She blamed Victor’s curse, though she couldn’t understand why Pea got to sleep the night through while Tamara paced the kitchen until twilight. She’d resorted to using Mrs. Grundy’s laudanum more nights than she liked to admit. Was it that Tammy was the oracle to Pea’s unhappy fate? Or was it the choice, that angel joker, that had the haints up in her business like a church lady at Sunday repast? She told herself she needed distraction, and so she rang Walter.
“Just checking in on my favorite place in the world,” she told him, aiming for and hitting that perfect note of airy cheerfulness, though it cost her more than it used to.
“Still standing, Tammy,” Walter said, dryly. “Miss us already?”
“It’s not exactly the Flamingo up in here, Walt.”
“I thought you hated the Flamingo. On principal.”
“Well, it’s certainly no Pelican! Who’s on tonight, anyway?”
“Some dancer,” Walter said, a little distracted. “I don’t remember the details. Someone on your list.”
“French or Russian?”
“Chicagoan?”
“Oh! Don’t tell me Katherine Dunham found time at last? Last I heard she’d gone to Hollywood and forgotten all about us.”
“It would seem she remembered. Tammy—I appreciate your interest in the joint, but you’re up there, we’re down here—”
“If you’re too busy, Walter, you can just say so.”
“Is everything all right with you and Pea?”
“Why wouldn’t everything be?”
“Just a feeling.”
“You got the hands now too?”
Walter laughed. “Grateful to say I’ve never had a dream come down. But I do know my business. You’ll let me know if you need me? I promised Dev I would keep her safe. I don’t make a lot of promises, Tammy.”
Keep her safe? And how, Tamara thought, was Walter going to keep Phyllis safe from her own bloody past? “There’s nothing wrong, Walter.”
“But you’ve been seeing dead people.”
Tamara opened her mouth and felt everything she had meant to say drain away. She had never felt so distant from the Pelican, from Victor’s New York, from the glittering play she’d performed for herself, night after night.
“How do you know that?” she asked flatly.
“Pea told me you think that Victor is haunting her. And right before she passed out that night at the Pelican you screamed something. About a body in a tree. So, tell me Tammy, what did you see?”
“I saw Pete Williams,” she said softly. Walter didn’t respond, so she found herself filling that soft space he left her with her own, real voice. “He was this boy I knew growing up. We might have kissed even, I don’t remember. I kissed a lot of boys. Mama didn’t like it, said that I was growing up like my dad. Anyway, Pete and I didn’t run with the same crowd. My mama taught literature at St. Paul’s and I lived mostly with my grandma, who had her master’s—the first in the family—anyway, we were that kind of family, some liked to call us uppity, but we were well educated, respectable, despite my dad. And Pete’s family lived in a one-room shack down by the creek and none of them stayed in school past eighth grade. Pete might have gotten through some high school, but he dropped out to work. Something dirty. Road work or construction, I don’t remember. He dated one of my girlfriends for a while, but we all said she could find someone better, so she left him. She married a dentist from Richmond … beat her ass every Sunday night, like it was part of the liturgy.
“Pete was a nice kid. Poor, not educated worth a damn, but kind. I think that’s worth a lot more than we realized back then. But they say that he fell for some white girl—not rich, either. Some cracker girl from a cracker family that also lived near the creek, but on the other side. I don’t think that she accused him—I think her family just didn’t like the idea of her with a black man. Not that they called him that. Not when all those men tied him up in the back of their pickup, and drove him a couple of miles outside of town, and strung him up on that old sycamore tree whose roots must go straight down to hell, and left him there for the crows and the possums and the little black children who found him. Little Pete. He grew up short and wide, but all muscle. He must have fought. There were too many of them. So they killed him and strung him up and no, I never saw him, Walter, not until that night at the Pelican when I saw him clear as sin swinging from the rafters with his neck broke in a noose and one foot in a bloody boot.”
“That’s why you left town, isn’t it?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Might be because I did the same.”
“You saw a lynching, Walter?”
He made an indeterminate noise, something between a snarl and a laugh. “Not quite. They took me and my sister from our mother and our grandparents, gave us to one pious white family after another, stuffed us full of the white man’s god and told us we had to atone for the sins of our fathers. Our skin was the sin, you understand. Our culture. My sister said if she could never go back home she would rather not be here at all. She hung herself. I ran off.”
Shock kept her silent for a long moment. Walter never spoke about his childhood; he never spoke about his life outside of the Pelican. She didn’t know the first thing about where Walter had grown up, not even the state, but she had always known he’d grown up with violence.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” she said, after a moment. “Why did you ever let them call you Red Man?”
Now he did laugh. “Who could understand that better than you, Tammy? Red Man was the price I paid so my sister’s murderers could never touch me again. Their insult became my bullet. And you?”
She had never liked being seen. But with Walter, it didn’t feel so bad.
“I came to New York and asked around for the baddest man in the Village. That’s why I stayed, even though I didn’t like … everything I saw. But he was the whitest white man I’d ever met. He could protect me from anything. With him, nothing could happen to me like what happened to Pete. But it turns out you can’t hide, Walter. Not the way I was doing. You turn around one day and the monster’s dead and his angel wants to put away her knives and pay off debts…”
“Can she?”
She took a shaky breath. “What do I know, Walter? What would someone like me know about that?”
* * *
That afternoon, Tamara went to Pea’s room and opened the curtains to let in the weak light.
Pea looked in her direction without turning her head.
“Is that really necessary?”
“You planning on sleeping through the winter?”
Pea sighed. “Sometimes she dreams about him.”
Tammy’s stomach gave a familiar lurch and she grabbed Pea’s cold tea from the bedside table. The lavender and rose hips had gone bitter in the night, but she drank it down straight. That goddamn baby, she thought, and then stopped herself from thinking any more. “Well,” Tamara said, businesslike, “I thought you might like to see this. You keep sleeping through the afternoons.”
Phyllis propped herself up on her elbows. “See what?”
Tammy’s smile came a little more easily now. “Just look out the window.”
Mrs. Grundy came up the driveway at 3:50. As always, she appeared to have walked. Tamara and Phyllis watched in astonishment as the housekeeper proceeded to wait on the front steps, gloved hands crossed in front of her.
Phyllis scooted closer to the window. “What the devil is she waiting for?”
“Just watch,” Tamara said.
“Did she walk from town?”
“She says that she enjoys the exercise.”
“And the cold biting off her nose, apparently!”
Tammy giggled. Some easy warmth returned to her, some of her flailing rage quieted like an exhausted baby. She could not hate Pea. She could not even, in moments like this, believe that the two of them were so very different.
At precisely four o’clock, the housekeeper lifted her right hand. Her knoc
k coincided with the second chime of the grandfather clock.
The display was all Tamara had hoped for; they shared a look and Phyllis burst out laughing.
“No!”
“Every afternoon!”
“Will you get it or should I?”
“You know you’re not supposed to rush.” Tamara jumped up from the bed. “Oh damn, the clock finished chiming, now she’ll just use it as an excuse to moan about how those Negroes are always running late.”
Phyllis started laughing so hard that she choked and Tamara thumped her slightly harder than necessary on the back. It was nearly a minute before Tamara finally made it to the door, where Mrs. Grundy waited, pinch-lipped, actually tapping her foot.
“Oh, you’re here already!” Tamara raised her hand to her cheek in theatrical consternation. From the top of the stairs, a muffled snort made Tamara jump. Mrs. Grundy peered past her into the dim entrance, as though into the lair of a dragon.
“I rang the bell,” said Mrs. Grundy, stiffly.
“Oh, did you?” She put on her best silly girl face, perfected these last few years at the Pelican. It was such a good face; it got her so much freedom—and love, when she wanted it—that there had been long stretches, months at a time, when she’d even believed it herself.
It did its work here; Mrs. Grundy sighed and walked into the front parlor. But Tamara noted, though she did not like to, how stiff that face had sat on her features, how hollow her voice, how empty her eyes. What, she now wondered, had any of those boys found there to love? Had even Clyde fallen for that player’s mask?
Tamara closed the door and went to help Phyllis down the stairs. They sat together in the parlor while Mrs. Grundy busied herself in the kitchen. Tamara’s easy mood had vanished like a soap bubble. What did it matter that she liked to play a little? What did it matter that she’d always been pretty enough to get folks to go her way? Oh, Aunt Winnie had disapproved and loudly, but she’d been an old woman, jealous of that easy power.
Phyllis gave her a long once-over while Tamara glowered. Why was this her choice? Why was this her weight, when she’d kept her head down, she’d kept her hands clean? But the cards pricked at her irritably, as did the memory of Victor, who was dead.
“What’s been eating you, Tammy? What aren’t you telling me? Is it the cards? You’ve sure been keeping them close lately.”
Tamara felt dizzy, in free fall. She reached out for a distraction. “That baby probably won’t be able to pass, you know.”
Phyllis touched the top of her belly, somehow larger again today than it had been yesterday. “You mean Durga.”
“Dev is too brown. She won’t be able to do like you.”
“We could say she was Indian. Or Mexican.”
“Not the same, is it? Mrs. Grundy won’t be shaking her hand, Miss High Yellow.”
“She’s making our meals, Tammy, and cleaning our toilets. I figure it was worth a handshake.”
“It wasn’t worth it to her, when it was my hand I held out there.”
“So she’s another bigoted white lady, Tammy. America’s full of them. Can I help that?”
Tamara drove a fist into the couch cushions, which merely swaddled the force of the blow. “You don’t have to play into it, either! Remember when you came back to the city after the wedding? Remember where you stayed, Phyllis?”
“The hotel?”
“The goddamn Algonquin. These whites up north, they might be too up their noses to put a sign above the door, but I sure as hell couldn’t go through it. Pea, pitch-toed as you are, you still Negro, you still know it, and ain’t none of this Miss Ann bullshit do you any credit.”
Phyllis drew in a sharp breath. She lowered a hand that seemed to have sprung up like a jack-in-the-box. “So where should I have stayed? Since you’re playing moral justice today.”
“In Harlem, how about!”
“Oh, so you live in Harlem now?”
“I don’t live in a goddamn cracker jack box named after a bunch of Indians they also wouldn’t let through the door!”
Phyllis punched out a breath. Then another. Tamara realized that she was laughing, gasping, hysterical. She fell to her side on the cushions and gripped her belly as though the child would otherwise claw its way out of her.
“What kind of a world am I bringing her into, Tammy? What awful world?”
5
A package of letters, courtesy of the U.S. Army, arrived one afternoon toward the middle of March. There was one from Dev, four whole pages filled on both sides with his broad, loopy handwriting. Tamara’s heart tweaked when she realized that he hadn’t sent her anything. She didn’t know why he would. Clyde had written to her, though. She kept the letter, unopened, for a day, trying to savor the fact that at the very least he was still alive.
“Well,” Phyllis asked her, that second day, “you gonna open it? All we do lately is wait, I don’t know why you want to go around waiting more.”
“At least this way I get to control it,” Tamara said. Phyllis nodded at that and put her head on her shoulder.
Clyde hadn’t been native to Lawrenceville like Tammy was; he had come to St. Paul’s from farther south as a student. Aunt Winnie had passed that winter and Tammy hadn’t been able to shake the blues ever since; she had wanted to leave town, but she couldn’t bear to, either. The cards told her to get out of the house, at least, so she went to the summer production of Romeo and Juliet. She sat there riveted to the seat while Clyde delivered Mercutio’s dying monologue. Afterward, she just stood in the lobby while he shook hands and joked and, eventually, noticed her. You liked the show? he asked her. You got a nice voice, Mercutio, she said, and he laughed and held out his hand.
They spent three weeks together. Days sitting on the broken wall outside the malt shop, waiting for the white busboys to give them their burgers from the back door. They’d take them back to the willow tree by the stream in her grandma’s yard and stay until sundown reading parts from plays that Clyde had discovered in the St. Paul’s library. Then she would read his numbers and show him her best tricks. He loved her deck as a piece of art and never once suggested the pawnshop. You can love someone for the smallest things, sometimes. She’d stumble through the door at nearly midnight, and her grandma would just look at her and tell her to be careful.
And then a prominent Negro theater in Richmond offered him a part in their fall season production of Othello. He would play Iago, a villain, for once. I’ve got a sweet face, that’s my problem. Always want me for the hero. She told him he had a big head, but he hardly heard her. He said that it was a good opportunity, that he couldn’t just rot away down in the country. She told him that he had her. He kissed her cheek. Oh, and how many times a day do you tell me about everything you’re gonna do when you get to New York, Tammy? The only thing I don’t know is why you haven’t left yet.
She felt crushed by the indignity of it. She had hated him for not seeing it, for thinking that a bad ending didn’t change the whole play.
But even as young as she was then, Tamara had an oracle inside her. She knew the ways of pulling good numbers out of bad.
She told him to meet her by the creek in two hours and bring some wine. He loved her, she knew it better than him. But he wouldn’t let that stop him. And she’d never pretended it would stop her.
She took him an hour outside of town, to a special spot by the old creek. They sat on the grass of the clearing and listened to the cicadas and drank a whole bottle of wine. The fireflies surrounded them, flew in and out of her hair. They were like buzzing green stars. They realized they could see the Milky Way. Then the clouds came in fast and the creek rose so high she wondered if they’d get caught. But they stayed and she sang to him. For the rest of her life she’d remember that. Singing Ellington in the charged air before a storm, holding hands with Clyde. The oracle part of her knew they might have a second chance because she changed the ending.
Clyde never forgot her; she’d made sure of that. The fireflies and
the rain that never quite fell, singing at the top of her lungs out there where no one could hear her (Gracious, girl! Those pipes!)—the whole reason she had stuck in his heart like old gum for years after they lost track of one another.
She wanted him for a good long time, Tamara had thought, if he made it back. If you can stand to look him in the eye. If you can bear the thought of being happy after you sell her down the river.
Tamara sat up abruptly and went down to the kitchen. She couldn’t—if Phyllis knew what the cards were saying—Tammy could never tell her.
Lately Phyllis had a hard time keeping anything down, so Tamara had asked Mrs. Grundy to make something sweet to tempt her. She came back upstairs with two spoons and a tray of bread pudding that was the housekeeper’s first effort.
Phyllis took her time with that first bite, then smiled ruefully. “It’s good,” she said.
“I’m shocked,” Tamara said. “You should have seen her face, as though I’d asked her to make a feast for Gluttony himself.”
“And the other six deadly sins if she had a spare minute.”
They leaned into one another with their laughter.
“Poor Mrs. Grundy,” Phyllis said. “You can almost see her asking God what she did to deserve such indignity.”
“Got stuck with two Negroes with a sweet tooth.”
“Oh, you know she probably ate half of this pudding down there by herself.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said Tamara, around another spoonful.
“So, that letter you got,” Phyllis said, while Tamara was laid out with ecstasy.
“This pudding tastes real good for you to go and ruin it.”
“Did you open it, at least?”
Tamara nodded.
“So what’d he say?”
“He broke up with me! That … that raggedy-ass, two-bit actor said that I shouldn’t ‘go to waste’ waiting on him! Like I were a goddamn apple pandowdy!”
“That can’t be all he said.”
“Why not?”
“Because I saw him. If that man don’t love you—”
“Sure he loves me. But that didn’t stop him! He said he misses me, he thinks of me all the time, when I’m in the back of that tank, with the guns pointing to the sky and the only thing I can see are the contrails and black smudges of those Zeroes, and if my hands aren’t steady it won’t just be me I’m killing but dozens of our men at the front, I think about you, and I find still waters.”
Trouble the Saints Page 26
