The next day, Mickey Moe told them he needed to go on an overnight trip to continue collecting premiums from all over. Collections had lapsed to near ruin for policyholders since he’d gone off on his quest. When he drove up to the house thirty-six hours later, he found his women sitting on the porch rocking, relaxing together. Laura Anne served another meal and at Mickey Moe’s quiet suggestion, poured Mama wine in such amounts that she slept early and soundly enough for the lovers to enjoy some time together uninterrupted and unobserved.
They drew the window shades in the living room and curled up together on the couch. Just before their fond embrace and sweet kisses got more serious, Mickey Moe pulled away.
I have something important to tell you, he said. But first, let me ask you this. Don’t you think you need to get in touch with your people? They must be worried sick about you.
Laura Anne winced. You know what? I did call them. From the road when we were in Memphis and you were out, you know, retrieving Daddy’s gun.
He sat up. What happened? What’d they say?
She looked away from him, embarrassed. She shifted her weight around as if she was trying to get away. Mama just cried and cried. I tried to soothe her, but Daddy grabbed the phone. He had a few choice words for me and hung up. I had a good cry myself after that. Then you got back to the room and said we were leavin’ fast, so I put it out of my mind. Your mama asked me about them this mornin’. It preys upon her that I’m here without their knowledge. I confided in her how sore it all made my heart. She thinks they’ll forgive us if we go to them hat in hand and humble. I’m not so sure.
Mickey pulled a folded-up paper from his back pocket. And what if we go to them hat in hand and humble with this?
She sat up and unfolded the thing carefully as though it was an artifact of some kind that might crumble to dust. Then her brow wrinkled. That other Bernard Levy’s birth certificate, I assume? I mean, the address is in the city at a hospital and your daddy was born outside town, poor as a church mouse, probably at home.
Oh, my love is so clever, thought Mickey Moe with pride, can’t put a thing past her.
Yes, yes, it is! he said. I got it yesterday from the town hall in Memphis. Can you believe our luck? It survived the flood! Look here’s what we’ll do. We’ll present this to your parents and say that my daddy was who he said he was after all. We’ll tell them that everything mysterious about my daddy had been a colossal misunderstanding. His Memphian people were estranged from him over his choice of a bride out of their sect, just as everyone believed before the war. Then after his death, they were pitiless, unrelenting, and refused to accept Beadie Sassaport Levy out of spite. It was not the quality of his blood that was questionable only that his blood had been cruel.
She took his face in her hands to study him. There was a matter of seminal importance to discuss about the foundation of her love for him.
But darlin’, it’ll be a story we’re tellin’, that’s all. You told me the day we met that truth was important to you, that you needed to atone for your daddy’s lies. What happened to all that? I fell in love with you because you were an honest man.
Sweetheart. You’re the one who shut the door on your daddy’s love with your deceptions. Can you really be asking me this?
She blushed. He continued.
Now that I know about my daddy’s life, it’s affected my judgment. Look at the lies he had to tell to find love and then protect it. Was he wrong? Should he have confessed to the authorities and left that gold to gather dust in Ghost Tree’s attic? Should he have turned in Bald Horace for murder? Should he have announced to the world of Sassaports that their prize daughter was not his first, abiding love? Besides there aren’t any Memphian Levys left to argue another side. It’s a good plan, and it’s foolproof.
She grimaced and shrugged, unsure. He kissed her again in a way that blotted out care. Alright, she thought. I’ve made my bed here. This is a good, brave man I have in my arms. We sealed our fates early on in that old sedan of his by the river. I love him whether he’s completely honest or only mostly.
When they got ready to depart for Greenville to confront her parents the following morning, she went shaky. She embraced Beadie farewell and clung to her in a way that both pleased and confounded the other. What’s the matter, child? Beadie whispered into the girl’s ear.
Oh Mama, she said, addressing her as she’d been requested to do, I’m afraid a little of what’s going to be.
If she’d had the courage, she might have confessed that she was more frightened on that day at that moment than she’d been the whole time she was up in Memphis and Littlefield with Mickey Moe facing the threat of arrest or death together. It was one thing to love her man from the security of her bedroom at her parent’s house and dream of liberation, another to experience crisis at his side in parts unknown, wild and violent, and yet a third to embark on a life of day-to-day living with perhaps—if her parents continued to reject her choice—only this woman she clung to for stability outside her man’s arms.
Beadie understood all this without requiring an explanation. Everyone’s scared at first, she said. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.
It was a Sunday. Laura Anne and Mickey Moe drove past Needleman’s Furniture to make sure her daddy wasn’t there, doing accounts. Satisfied both her parents would likely be home, they went directly to the house on Elton Street, parked, and gathered courage to walk up to the front door. You know, honey, she said, I always thought of this as a big house, but it looks so small to me now. Is that a good sign?
He gave her a quick peck on the cheek. Yes, darlin’, I think it is.
Rose and Lot Needleman caught wind of their arrival before they reached the house. The front door opened when they were halfway to it. Laura Anne kept her eyes down while Mickey Moe, holding her hand as they advanced, gave the pair a bright, bold as brass smile. Rose shrunk behind her husband as if requiring a shield against all that light. Lot, dark and immobile, glared.
So, he said through the screen door. You’ve come back.
The sight of her mother cringing behind her father jolted Laura Anne. The pose distressed her immensely, broke her heart with guilt and another emotion hard to name. Maybe it was a new fear that beset her, fear that she’d turn into her mother one day, unable to help herself, cringing behind a man. It was a breathtaking thought. One that renewed her courage. She dropped Mickey Moe’s hand just as he was about to speak up and spoke for herself.
Yes, Daddy, I have, she said. Mama, please don’t be afraid. We’re not here to argue with you, we’re here to reconcile.
Reconcile? Lot snorted. Reconcile? Next you’ll be expectin’ a fatted calf.
Oh com’on, Daddy. Just let us in. The neighbors have had enough speculation to chew on, don’t you think? Want to give them more?
Rose Needleman sprang into action. She pulled backward on Lot’s belt. She’s right, she said. Let them in, Lot. Please.
The four of them settled down in the front parlor. The young people sat side by side on the settee, the elders in two winged armchairs opposite. There was a heavy wood coffee table in between. Amid a silence as thick as gumbo mud, Mickey Moe reached inside his jacket’s breast pocket and pulled out a bundle wrapped in a white linen handkerchief. He laid it on the table. It made a little clunk, louder than it needed to be in all that quiet. With the delicacy of a man defusing a bomb, he undraped the object within, corner-by-white-linen-corner, exposing at last in all its majesty Lot Needleman’s handgun. There was a deeper silence, and Lot said, Where’d you get that.
Laura Anne’s daddy was confused. Turned out, he never even missed his pistol. Hadn’t had call for the thing. So Laura Anne started to laugh. Here they were so concerned about his reaction, and there really wasn’t much of one, was there? Then she told them everything about their time in the backwoods. About Mickey Moe’s quest to find Aurora Mae and about J. Henry and Walter Cohen and poor Jeffrey Harris and poor Jeffrey Harris’s severed foot. She told them about los
ing the gun and Mickey Moe gambling his life to find it again, the shots that were fired, and the interview with Aurora Mae. Well, she only told part of that last. Whatever parts fit with the next revelation they had to spill.
Rose Needleman listened with a hand on her heart and her eyes wide, so enthralled by her daughter’s courage her twitch ceased for the time being. Lot Needleman’s eyes welled up with tears, his hands clenched and unclenched with frustration as he imagined his baby girl in mortal peril. Somewhere in there, gratitude to the man who’d protected her headstrong self from harm was born.
When it came time for the final disclosure, Mickey Moe reached again into this breast pocket and pulled out Bernard the handsome’s birth certificate. He laid it out on the surface of the coffee table, smoothing out its wrinkles with two hands before giving it to his future in-laws to view. And that’s all there is to tell, he said, after they’d absorbed the paper’s contents and his story of the Memphian Levys’ hardness of heart. Accept that I love your daughter and she loves me, and we’re getting married with your approval or without it. But we dearly hope and pray that with both explanation and evidence, you will see your way to remove your objections to my bloodlines and accept us.
Rose Needleman, who’d had just about enough of suffering, looked over her shoulder twice in rapid succession. It was out of habit, for her nerves were now calmed for the first time since that Sunday supper when they’d insulted Mickey Moe on purpose. Then she opened up her arms and said, Oh my sweet girl! How I’ve missed you!
That nearly shocked the pants off Lot Needleman or so it seemed as he grabbed onto his belt at the sound of her words and hitched his pants up twice, roughly, as if about to undertake heavy lifting. Rose! he said. Rose! He wasn’t sure they should let the young people get away with their rebellious and wounding deeds so easily.
It was too late. The women were in each other’s arms, weeping the kind of happy feminine tears women reserve for such full moments.
Lot fumbled and hmm’d and looked to the only other man in the room for a witness to such unseemly behavior, shaking his head and hands as if to say, You see that? You see that?
And the only other man in the room smiled back at him with great delight, his shoulders shrugged, his palms uplifted in that age-old posture of his people that said, Yes I do, but so what? Really, so what?
Six months later, they married under a chuppah in the Needlemans’ backyard.
They lived with Beadie at the old house at the beginning of their marriage, but after Aunt Lucille passed on, Mickey Moe took over her farm, and they lived there with Beadie in her own suite of rooms off the second drawing room. They raised some livestock, enough to keep them in eggs and milk, and Mickey Moe bought a horse to drive a Sunday cart purchased from a farmer on his insurance route. They hoed a few rows of vegetables and a couple of acres of cotton. They let out the rest of the property to sharecroppers. They were generous to their tenants and didn’t overcharge. Once they convinced Mama Jo Baylin it was a good idea, they moved her and Bald Horace to a spare house among the ’croppers and bought them a couple of goats to cheer Bald Horace up. It was a fine life, a happy life. Then all of a sudden, Mickey Moe was drafted due to the chicanery of the Guilford draft board, under pressure in that time to draft more white men rather than so many blacks. They started with the whites they knew couldn’t complain. They started with the Jews. Which meant that Mickey Moe was off to Vietnam.
Laura Anne would never forget the day they said good-bye before he went overseas. She tried as hard as she could to be brave, but nightmares tormented her. Perhaps because she was pregnant, she went weak and told Mickey Moe about the dreams.
I dream of your daddy a lot, she said through tears that shamed her. I dream of him in that foxhole leaning up against the roots of an old, dead tree and then his face starts to turn into yours and I run up to him in my housedress and I have an apron on and I try to rub your face out of his head. Then your skin starts to come off, and you bleed like you were just about bathed in a chemical, somethin’ really harsh.
She shivered as much with humiliation that she’d voiced her terrors as with the terror itself. He wrapped her in his arms, stroking her back until a great moan came out of her, one not so much of misery as relief.
Don’t worry, he said to her, pulling her in closer, making his voice as steady and reassuring as he could, I am nothing like my daddy. I do not share his fate.
And because she had to, she believed him.
XVII
Saint Louis, Missouri–Memphis, Tennessee–New Orleans, Louisiana–Guilford, Mississippi, 1930–1941
ONCE HE GOT FAR ENOUGH out of Kansas City that he could be sure Mrs. Karp hadn’t caught wind of his return and followed him, Bernard went back to Saint Louis for the rest of his gold. After he dug that up, he stashed his treasure in a secret compartment he’d crafted in the boot of the Model T. Since he could not resist the call of the past, he went to visit the old house, currently inhabited by Cousin Mags.
Cousin Mags treated him like royalty. She kicked her two sons out of his old bedroom off the kitchen and installed him there with her best linens and fresh flowers in a vase. He wasn’t going to stay more than a night but lingered a week for the pleasure of listening to stories of Aurora Mae and Bald Horace in their childhoods, many of which he knew already from the lips of those two, but all of which he delighted in hearing again and again. His heart, he realized, had begun to heal. It gave him pure joy to hear Aurora Mae’s name spoken aloud where once he’d felt only sorrow. Cousin Mags told him she’d opened a botanical shop in Memphis just as she said she would and did fairly well by all reports. It was like waving a bone in front of a dog. A dangerous idea pestered him like hunger.
By the end of the week, he decided. He would visit Aurora Mae in Memphis, and they would be like old loving friends who meet to reminisce and share the warmth the past had knit between them. Nothing more. It would be an occasion of peace to him, a way to let old love behind, so’s he could search unencumbered for the new. He hoped she’d know where Bald Horace was and how he fared. Then he could look him up, too.
Before he quit the place, he put a handful of gold coin underneath a bell jar in the kitchen on a shelf that held Aurora Mae’s germinating herbs in the old days before the flood. He touched the shelf with two fingers and then kissed them, as if that simple plank of wood were a mezuzah. The gesture felt strange to him yet familiar also, and he questioned himself on the whys of that. He’d had acquaintance of mezuzahs at his grandparents’ home all those years ago though he couldn’t recall anyone ever caressing them. Maybe five times in preparation for his bar mitzvah, he’d visited the traveling rabbi’s horse-drawn caravan, which was graced with mezuzahs at every portal, exterior and interior both. It was likely he’d learned the devotion from him and had forgotten it until now, when moved by an object he found sacred in its own right for who had used it. He smiled and shrugged at himself for being a sentimental man. He set off for Memphis for a reunion with someone he pretended to himself was nothing more than an old, beloved friend.
In those days, Orange Mound was largely a shantytown, home to the Great Depression’s most down-and-out. Hobos arrived and quit the place after a sniff of air knowing the pickings there were worse than slim. There were shotgun houses, narrow boxes of undressed lumber, all in a jumble, as there were not so much roads connecting them as paths and sewage pits. Canvas tents were pitched all around the churches as shelter for those without, and everywhere there were men and women congregating outside, watching the children, flirting, arguing, trading whatever they could, praising Jesus. There was no work, and nothing else to do.
Three times, Bernard stopped to ask directions of men surprised by the sight of a vehicle driven by a white man in those parts, even one as beat up as the rattletrap he drove. Men approached him with hats in hand and bug-eyed smiles as they hoped for a handout. He’d describe Aurora Mae and mention she had a business, The Lenaka, somewhere thereabouts. They’d say,
oh yessir, the shaman lady, why you just keep goin’ south, and you’ll find her, can’t miss her place, no, not even if you tried.
Bernard gave them a nickel each and meandered on until at last, just as they’d said, there arose from out of the dung heap that was Orange Mound an oasis of prosperity, a shining white shingled house with an iron fence all ’round. Within the fence was a garden green with tall, feathery herbs and flowering bushes. A small glass dependency for growing things stood out the back as well. The house had lace curtains on the windows and a big bright door of haint blue with a brass knocker in the shape of a ram’s horned head. A sign on a post just outside the front gate read THE LENAKA. As an aid to those who could not read, a variegated leaf dangling above a mortar and pestle was painted underneath the words. He parked his car around the corner where it would not be seen.
Bernard huddled in a doorway across the street for a few moments, trying to still his wildly pumping chest. He laughed at himself. The mere sight of the house filled him with excitement and the heat of an infinite tenderness. She is near, he thought, she is within those walls that sparkle like a palace in the desert. Whatever made him think he’d traveled there for the sake of nostalgia, love’s lukewarm cousin? Love is eternal, he thought, why, everlastin’! It didn’t matter how many Mrs. Karps his life acquired—although he prayed to the Lord there’d only ever be just the one—or how many wives—same prayer—the woman in that house over there had a leash around his heart. He continued to marvel at true affection’s mysteries when the door to The Lenaka opened.
A tall, broad black man in a charcoal pinstripe suit, spectator shoes, and a bold red cravat to match the hatband of his gray fedora exited. He held the bright blue door ajar with one gloved hand and twirled an ivory-topped cane with the other. Bernard watched him, fascinated. What kind of a man is this? he wondered. He looked like a riverboat swell, but those types didn’t come in Negro that he knew of. Maybe he was some kind of actor or a landlocked gambler. Then Aurora Mae Stanton came out join him for a promenade down Carnes Street.
One More River Page 23
