The Wicked City

by Beatriz Williams

  “No!”

  This word, unlike the others, comes out by force. Sort of a strangled little shout. I lie there on my side, facing her, smelling her medicine sick-sweet smell, the damp heat of her nightgown, holding her hand. Realizing that the smell of medicine is really the smell of alcohol, only more pure. I touch her hair, which is softer than I guess I was expecting, thin and fine next to her head, like somebody’s been brushing it all day. Her head is moving a little, from side to side.

  “Now, Mama. You just rest.”

  “That was your daddy. Your poor dear daddy.”

  I place my hand on her opposite cheek and turn her face an inch or two in my direction. “Mama! You mean Duke? That was Duke’s idea? My education?”

  “He did love you so.”

  “Oh, Mama. I don’t know about that. Duke—”

  “Your daddy,” she insists, fervent emphasis, and I realize, in the darkness, her eyes are wide open, and she’s staring at me like you might stare at an apparition of some kind, a vision from another universe.

  “My daddy,” I repeat.

  The eyes close. “Loves you so.”

  Now, I’ve never given much thought to the man who sired me. I guess that might surprise you. All the Fifth Avenue psychologists say that I ought to have some kind of complex about my real daddy, some kind of fixation, most especially since the fellow who took his place turned out so rotten. Well, that might be true for some girls, but not for me. I don’t spare him a single consideration, most days. Why should I? I don’t reckon he spares one for me. And just look what he did to my mama! Leaving her to die away like this, stuck inside her poor old broken-down childbearing body. Inasmuch as I mind him at all, I figure he’s some Manhattan swell who spotted my mama and thought he might have himself a good time with a pretty girl from the revue, and so he did.

  So I can’t quite explain why that tender whisper—Loves you so—causes such a bubble to swell up in my chest. Squeeze out all else. Breath and heart and everything.

  “You mean my real daddy, Mama? That who you mean?”

  She’s moving her lips, but the words aren’t coming forth, and I give her hand a squeeze, kind of sharp, to bring her back to River Junction. Her eyelids make this spasm. She says, “Laura Ann,” except it all runs together, Laurann.

  “Who’s Laurann?”

  “Laurann.”

  I pick my thoughts a bit. Stroking her hand. “You mean Laura Ann Green, Mama?”

  “Laurann,” she says once more, nodding, and she closes her eyes again, like in rapture, and goes all still, just her lips moving and moving without making a sound, and there’s nothing I can do to rouse her.

  Though I do realize, some time later, that her fever is gone. Skin as cool and dry as yesterday’s washing.

  13

  MAMA’S DEAD by morning. The nurse and I wash her frail body and lay her out on the bed in what Johnnie says is her favorite dress, though I don’t recognize it. Course not. I guess it must be one of the new ones Duke bought her. Velvet the color of midnight. Fashion that from before the war. Her skin is terribly pale against that dress.

  Soon after comes the undertaker, neat and respectful in his black suit. He and his assistant load my mama into the van, and the assistant drives the van away while the undertaker disappears with Duke into some kind of private study on the first floor. By now it’s gone ten o’clock. Too late to go back to bed and get some sleep, even if I could, though I haven’t slept more than three or four hours in the past forty-eight. Can’t even imagine the act of closing my eyes. Too many thoughts jumping around behind them. I wander around the first floor, heels clickety-clack on the fields of pale marble, looking for the kitchen and a possible pot of good black coffee. Figure it’s got to be around here somewhere. Round the back, out of sight, a rich man’s kitchen.

  I pass through the door at the corner of the dining room and down a long corridor of a butler’s pantry and there it lies, good glory, a kitchen about the size of the entire first floor of the old house, inhabited by a cook and a kitchen maid, cleaning up the breakfast dishes. The maid wipes her apron and fetches me toast and coffee. Her face is familiar. I expect I went to school with her too, in that time I try generally not to remember about. Before they sent me off to the nuns. I stand about awkwardly, thinking of something to say to the cook, who stares at me under her eyebrows like I’m some kind of exotic new fruit she’s fixing to chop up and serve at luncheon. Duke Kelly’s missing daughter, turned up on the eve of her mama’s passing on. You don’t see that kind of thing walking through your kitchen door every day.

  So I stand there staring at the ceiling, arms crossed behind my back. Cook sets to work. Toast arrives crisp and buttery, coffee hot and thick. Maid says softly, “I’m awful sorry about your mama, Geneva Rose,” and I put my face into grievous position, the kind of expression I guess you’re supposed to return to a statement like that, and I thank her for her sympathy. Still can’t remember her damn name.

  Since I am so patently in the way, here inside this brand-new kitchen of Duke’s, staffed by staff, brand-new Garland range, brand-new icebox, pantry the size of Pennsylvania Station, I pour myself a little more coffee and wander back upstairs to Mama’s room. The door to the study is still shut tight. Nobody stirring. The house has got that heavy, unsettling quiet lying atop the floors and the furniture, like you don’t even dare to whisper. My mama’s dead. My mama’s gone. Just her room left behind, her relics. What used to be Mama. Still, I climb back up those stairs, bearing my coffee cup in its saucer, looking for her. As if, when I push open that heavy, carved door, she’s going to be lying there again, containing some scrap of life left, some bit of blessed spirit on this earth.

  Bedroom’s empty. Maids haven’t started the cleaning yet. Counterpane a little rumpled, betraying a wee hollow where her body lay before the undertaker and his stone-faced assistant loaded her up and carried her off. I set down the coffee and crawl in. Curl myself into the hollow of Mama’s body. Smells like medicine and sweat, and I guess I will smell that particular combination all my life now, all my life I will carry that scent in my head and it will bring this moment back to me, this void, this terrifying absence of my mama from this earth. This air on my skin, where her soft arms should rest, holding me safe from harm.

  14

  AND THEN a funny thing happens. I don’t know if you believe in ghosts. I sure enough don’t. I believe in what I can see and touch. What exists. Why, there’s times I can’t say for certain I believe in God Himself. He does have a habit of making Himself scarce around here.

  Anyway, I am lying in my mama’s bed, in the cool hollow of the counterpane formed by what was my mama’s living body, a short time ago, and I imagine I hear my mama’s voice. Not inside my head, where it regularly belongs, but outside. From no particular direction. Just there. Clear words. Laura Ann.

  I open my eyes.

  Nothing there.

  Just the furniture, French, topped in marble, one Looey or another, gilded an inch or so thick and bought at great expense, I reckon, from some dealer in Baltimore or Philadelphia, bearing no attachment whatsoever to my mama’s past, or mine.

  Still. I sit up. Swing my legs to the floor. I am unwashed, wearing yesterday’s dress, could not yet bother myself to open my wee satchel and freshen up. I catch my reflection in the opposite mirror, the one stuck above the drawer chest, except that it isn’t my reflection at all, it’s my mama’s. Mama’s gentle face inside a frame of my own bobbed ginger hair, except younger somehow, the way she looks in her wedding photograph, smooth dairy skin and playful hooded eyes, lips parted a half inch, gazing right directly at me, Geneva Rose Kelly, like she’s got something stuck inside her she wants to let out.

  “What is it, Mama?” I ask her, even though I don’t believe in ghosts.

  I guess my eyesight returns to normal just then, or maybe I’ve blinked, because it’s just my own ordinary face in the mirror now. Not beautiful at all, only sort of striking, the kind of fa
ce that photographs well, almost downright ugly since I haven’t slept in so long. Wide face and slanted blue eyes, large sharp nose and full mouth and chin descending to a point like a witch’s hat. Not my mama at all.

  Still. I rise to my feet and walk across the room to that damn mirror above the gilded drawer chest, and I reach out my hand and touch the surface, as if that might summon her back. Summon back the illusion of her. But my fingers meet only the cold, smooth surface of my own image, just below the scared right eye, and though I wait and wait, I don’t hear anything more, nor does the face in the mirror change to anything more agreeable or straightforward than my own imperfect mug. I let my hand fall, right down next to the small ormolu clock ticking under the exact center of the mirror, and the square enamel box before it.

  And my gaze drops too, right down there to where my hand rests, and naturally my curiosity and my despair sort of direct themselves into the smooth, expensive surface of that box. Not one she had before, that’s for certain. Not trimmed and hinged and fastened in gold. I expect Duke must have given her that box, to keep all her—what? Trinkets? Mama never did have any trinkets. None that didn’t get pawned at one juncture or another.

  I stand there for some time, staring at that pretty box. At my long, slender hand resting next to one corner. I don’t go in for lacquer—just you try keeping your nail lacquer shiny while your fingers go tappity-tap on a typewriter all the livelong day, and besides, they don’t allow nail lacquer at Sterling Bates, heavens no—but I take nice care of the nails anyway, file them regular, rub my cuticles with cream. A fine-looking hand, by any standard. And I swear that hand does not move. Does not so much as twitch one single fingertip.

  But the lid of that enamel box does slowly rise into the air.

  15

  ON THE other hand, I am so damn tired. (You recollect, perhaps, that I have not slept four hours in the past forty-eight.) So I might well be dreaming. Or I might be observing this sequence of strange events as a kind of mirage, the way desert travelers imagine things that aren’t there: things they desire to see, things for which they thirst and long and crave, like water. Like shelter. Like the green shade of a date palm.

  So I stand there and listen to the tick of that ormolu clock, nice and steady, though my heartbeat strikes about twice for every second. I stand there staring at that enamel lid, gaping wide like the mouth of an alligator. Box is about eight inches square. Delicate gilt motif of an Oriental type, painted in small, precise repeats, and you would not believe the intricate gold trim along the edges, simply could not have been wrought by human hands, howsoever nimble. There is not enough light that I can see what lies inside. Not a glimmer or a shadow or a hint. So I stand there, ears peeled, concentration absolute, waiting for some kind of instruction, I guess, that never does arrive. Ticktock. My pulse settles. I move my finger.

  “Now, then. I just thought I might find you here, Geneva Rose. Picking through the loot.”

  I expect the jump of my nerves does me no credit.

  “You get on out of this room, Duke Kelly. You got no business here.”

  He just laughs, free as you please. Wearing a black mourning suit, black tie. Collar all white and stiff against his bull neck. He steps forward and settles himself in the armchair before the fireplace—fire’s gone out, nobody’s come to lay more coal—and crosses one leg over the other. Nods to the drawer chest and my guilty body, shielding the open box. To my arms folded over my drumming heart. Tells me: “You can take that, if you want. Take whatever you damn please.”

  “I’m not taking anything from here.”

  “You sure about that? There’s a fortune laying here in this room with us. Jewelry inside the safe right there. Clothes from Paris. I know you like pretty clothes, Geneva Rose. Pretty things.”

  “I don’t want your things.”

  Shrugs. “As you like, sugar. You change your mind, it’s all right here waiting for you. Not going nowhere.”

  “You set a date for the funeral?”

  “Friday noon. You fixing to stay?”

  “Course I am. She’s my mama.”

  “You be needing a room to sleep in.”

  All of a sudden, I wish I had a cigarette. Something for my fingers and mouth to do. I uncross my arms. Brace my hands against the drawer chest behind me. “I can stay with a friend.”

  “Friend, Geneva Rose? What friend? You ain’t got no more friends in River Junction. Nobody seen you in years.”

  “Ruth Mary Leary would have me.”

  Duke smiles and reaches inside his jacket. “Now, baby girl, ain’t no need for that kind-a thing. Ruth Mary’s got four wee babes-a her own. She ain’t got the room for you. And folks’ll talk, won’t they? You don’t want folks a-talking, do you?”

  “I guess they’ve been talking plenty already. Don’t make any difference if they talk some more. Anyway, I don’t give a damn if they talk or not. I gave that up long ago. I don’t give two cents what folks here think about me.”

  He takes a long first drag of his cigarette, and when he pulls his mouth away and blows out a pleasurable big gust of smoke, he tells me I’m a damn fool.

  “I’d be a damn fool to stay under your roof another night.”

  “Now, there you go again, Geneva Rose. Thinking I desire any more piece-a you, when you been spreading those pretty legs-a yours all across New York City the past four years.”

  “So you say. When did I ever trust a word from your mouth?”

  He shakes his head slowly and pipes a little more smoke from his gasper. Considers the ceiling, twelve feet high. “I ain’t never broken my solemn word, Geneva Rose, and that’s the truth. You can rest easy under my roof. That ain’t what I want from you no more. All grown up as you are.”

  “I don’t care what you want from me. You’re not getting it. I am leaving River Junction for good, the second my mama’s grave is covered over. You won’t be seeing me around here again, not ever. You won’t be hearing from me. Not a single word, do you hear me? I’m done with you.”

  “What about your brothers and your sister? You done with them, too?”

  “They know where to find me.”

  “Your baby sister don’t. She is but five years old. Why, she won’t even know you, by the time she’s grown.” My stepfather leans back in the armchair now, black on crimson. Smokes all comfortable. Says quietly, still gazing at the ceiling, “Fixing to be a beauty, your sister, ain’t she? An almighty beauty.”

  What a throat he’s got. Tendons all stuck out, thick and round and pink as a watermelon. Adam’s apple does this jig up and down as he swallows back spit. From his hand trails the cigarette, which I crave right now as I crave water to drink. Air to breathe. Bed to sleep in. But I don’t say so. Would rather skin myself. I just shrug and say I guess she is, hard to tell at her age. But she sure does dote on Johnnie, and he worships her right back. Wouldn’t let a fly touch a strand of her hair, I’ll bet. I’ll bet he’d kill the fellow who touched her, sure enough. Cut that fellow’s throat and leave him for dead. Leave him to choke on his own blood.

  Duke closes his eyes and smiles at the ceiling. The silk-hung ceiling, as crimson as hell.

  “Geneva Rose,” he says, “I do sometimes feel that the two of us might-a got off on the wrong foot together.”

  “No such thing as together with you and me, Duke Kelly. No such thing.”

  “Baby girl. You just settle your sweet self down. You ain’t thinking clear. I’m talking about business.” Chin lowers at last. Eyes open to meet mine. “Business, that’s all.”

  “Business? You and me?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  My palms are sweating against the edge of the drawer chest. Head’s got that sick feeling, like I might pass out. Feel some kind of weight pressing right between my shoulder blades, a kind of poking and prodding, something trying to make itself known. I stick out my chin and say, “I’ve got no interest in your line of business.”

  “Now, that is plain unkin
d-a you, Geneva Rose. You ain’t even heard me out.”

  “I don’t need to hear you out. You’re a damn bootlegger, is what you are, and I may trickle a little refreshment down my throat from time to time, but I don’t like to think about how it got in my hand, and I especially don’t like to think about the men like you who put it there. You can keep your business to yourself. I don’t want any part of it. Any part of you.”

  I say this all impassioned, sort of a fury, and Duke, my stepfather, my dead mama’s husband, the daddy of my brothers and my sister, he just sets his elbow on the arm of that chair and curls his meat hand into a fist and leans his cheek into the knuckles of that fist. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t twitch. Curtains be shut tight out of respect, only an electric lamp burning by the side of the bed, and his skin’s all smooth and dusky and his eyes are empty. He is like a man someone carved out of wax.

  “You believe you’re too good for me, Geneva Rose? Too good for this family and this town? That it? Because myself, I do happen to believe that we are all God’s creatures, sugar, all of us here created in His precious image, and there ain’t none of us no better than the other. And the people-a this town, they is mighty grateful for this business you don’t want no part of. Mighty grateful. They ain’t starving and they ain’t falling sick like they did. You want these good people to starve, Geneva Rose? You want them to die-a the ague and the pneumonia and the bearing-a children?”

  “You mean like Mama did?”

  Well, he does flinch at that. A little bit of pink seems to stain his cheeks, if I’m not mistaken in this somber-lit room.

  “Sweetheart. Your poor mama never was strong. Ain’t nothing we could-a did for her, except to make her comfortable. Done all we could for her until the good Lord seen fit to gather her back into His loving arms.”

  Now the hair is prickling on the nape of my neck and the skin of my arms. Now the electricity tingles my scalp. Damp and nervy. Air seems fit to burst all around us, like some kind of fireworks contained in the atoms and molecules striking against me. The angry pressure between the blades of my shoulders just squeezes away my breath. I’m afraid to turn my head back to that mirror. Back to that open enamel box.