by Colum McCann
My father used to say he liked to sit back and listen to the whole place make noise.
The days I recall finest were about as ordinary as they come—playing hopscotch on the slab of broken concrete, following my brothers through McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 286
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the cornfields, trailing my schoolbag through the dust. My older brothers and I read a lot of books back then—a bookmobile came around our street once every few months, staying fifteen minutes. When the sun bubbled yellow on the broken fence we ran out from the house, down towards the back of Chaucer’s grocery store, to play in a stream that strikes me now as paltry, but back then was a waterway to contend with. We’d sail steamships down that mighty creek, and we’d have Nigger Jim whopping on Tom Sawyer for all he was worth. Huck Finn was not one we knew quite what to do with, and we mostly left him out of our adventures. The paper boats went around the corner and away.
My father was a house painter most of the time, but the thing he loved to do was hand- paint signs on the doorways of businesses in town. The names of important men on frosted glass. Gold- leaf lettering and careful silver curlicues. He got occasional work with the trading companies, the mills, and the small- town detective agencies. Every now and then a museum or an evangelical church wanted its welcome signs touched up. His business was nearly all in the white part of town, but when he worked on our side of the river we would go along with him and hold his ladder, hand him brushes and cloths. He painted wooden signs that swung in the wind for real estate and riverbed clams and sandwiches that cost a nickel. He was a short man who dressed impeccably for every job, no matter where it was. He wore a creased shirt with a starched collar and a silver tie pin. His trousers were cuffed at the bottom and he was happy to say that if he looked hard enough he could see the reflection of his work in his shoes. He never mentioned a single thing to us about money, or the lack of it, and when the Depression really kicked in, he simply went around to all of his old jobs and touched up the paint in the hope that the business would stay alive, and they might slip him a dollar or two when times were good.
The lack of money didn’t bother my mother too much—she was a woman who had known the worst of times and best of times: she was old enough to have heard all the slave stories firsthand, and wise enough to see the value of getting out from under its yoke, or at least as far as anyone could get out from it in southern Missouri in those days.
She had been given, as a memento, the exchange slip from when my grandmother had been sold, and it was something she carried to remind her of where she came from, but when she finally got a chance to sell it, McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 287
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she did—to a museum curator who came from New York. She used the money to buy herself a secondhand sewing machine. She had other jobs too, but mostly she worked as a cleaner in the newspaper office in the center of town. She came home with papers from all over the country and at night read us the stories she considered the good ones, stories that opened up the windows of our house, simple tales about climbing a tree for cats, or boy scouts helping the fire brigade, or colored men fighting for what was good and right, what our mother called justful.
She wasn’t from the Marcus Garvey choir: she held no rancor nor any desire to go back, but she wasn’t averse to thinking that a colored woman could get herself a better place in the world.
My mother had the most beautiful face I knew, perhaps the most beautiful one I’ve ever known: dark as darkness, full, perfectly oval, with eyes that looked like my father had painted them, and a mouth that had a slight downturn of sadness, and the brightest teeth, so that when she smiled, it threw her whole face into another relief. She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen.
Up until the age of eight I was allowed to sleep alongside my brothers, and, even after that, our mother would still put me in the bed beside them and read us all to sleep. Then she slipped her wide arms under me and carried me to my own mattress, which, because of the layout of the house, was in the narrow hallway outside her bedroom. I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don’t begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.
On an August evening when I was eleven, my father walked through the door with a splatter of paint on his shoes. My mother, who was baking bread, just stared at him. He had never before, not once, ruined his clothes while out painting. She dropped a teaspoon to the ground. A little patch of melted butter spread on the floor. “What in the name of Luther happened t’you?” she whispered. He stood pale and drawn, and gripped the edge of the red- and- white- checked tablecloth. He seemed like he was swallowing to steady his voice. He faltered a little and his McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 288
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knees buckled. She said: “Oh, Lord, it’s a stroke.” She put her arms around him.
My father’s narrow face in her big hands. His eyes skipping past hers.
She looked up and shouted at me: “Gloria, go get the doctor.”
I slid out the door in my bare feet.
It was a dirt road in those days and I can recall the texture of each step—it sometimes feels that I’m running that road still. The doctor was sleeping off a league of hangovers. His wife said he couldn’t be disturbed, and she slapped me twice on either side of the face when I tried to break past her up the stairs. But I was a girl with a good set of lungs. I screamed good and loud. He surprised me when he came to the head of the stairs, peered down, and then got his little black bag. I rode for my very first time in a motorcar, back to our house, where my father was still sitting at the kitchen table, clutching his arm. It was, it turned out, a mild enough heart attack, not a stroke, and it didn’t change my father much, but it took the wind from my mother’s heart. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight: she was afraid he’d collapse at any moment. She lost her job at the newspaper when she insisted that he had to come sit with her as she cleaned: the editors couldn’t abide the thought of a colored man sifting through their papers, though they saw nothing wrong with a woman doing it.
One of the most beautiful things I ever saw—still, to this day—was the sight of my father getting ready to go fishing one afternoon with some friends he’d made at the local corner store. He bumbled his way around the house, packing. My mother didn’t want him to carry any of it, not even the rod and tackle, for fear it might strain him. He slammed more tackle into the picnic basket and shouted that he’d carry any damn thing he wanted. He even loaded the basket with extra beer and tuna- fish sandwiches for his friends. When a whistle came from outside, he turned and kissed her at the door, tapped her rear end, and whispered something in her ear. Mama snapped her head back and laughed, and I figured years later that it must’ve been something good and rude. She watched him go until he was almost out of sight beyond the corner, then she came back inside and got on her knees—she wasn’t a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart’s future was in a spadeful of dirt—but she began praying for rain, an all- out serious prayer that might bring my father back quickly so she could be with him.
That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 289
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grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your ow
n.
I will not for the life of me forget the sign they painted for me a few years later, after I’d lost two of my brothers in the Second World War over Anzio, and after the bombs had been dropped on Japan, after the speeches and the glad- handing. I was on my way up north to attend college in Syracuse, New York, and they had written on a little sign with my father’s favorite paint, the precious gold that he kept for high- class jobs, and they held it up at the bus station, the placard built strong like a kite with a diamond- shaped back so it wouldn’t flap in the wind: COME HOME
SOON, GLORIA.
I didn’t come home soon. I didn’t come home at all. Not then, at least.
I stayed up north, not so much running wild as having my head in books, and then my heart in a quick marriage, and then my soul in a sling, and then my head and heart in my own three little boys, and letting the years slip by, like folk do, watching my ankles puff up, and the next time I truly came home, to Missouri, years later, I was freedom- riding on the buses, and hearing stories about the police dragging out the water cannons, and I could hear my mother’s voice in my ears: Gloria, you’ve done nothing all this time, nothing at all, where have you been, what have you done, why didn’t you come back, didn’t you know I was praying for rain?
—
i ’ v e g ot a bod y now, near thirty years later, that people think is church-going. I’ve got dresses that pull tight in the rear and keep my bosom from swaying. I thread the left shoulder of my blackest dress with a gold-colored brooch. I carry a white handbag with a looping handle. I wear hose stockings right up to my knees and sometimes I pull on a set of white gloves that go high to my elbows.
I’ve got a voice, too, with an undertow, so people look at me and think that I’m about to break into some old cane- field spiritual, but the truth is I haven’t seen God since those early days when I left Missouri and I’d rather go home to my room in the Bronx and pull the bedsheets high and listen to Vivaldi slide through the stereo speakers than listen to any preacher ranting on about how to save the world.
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In any case, I can hardly fit in pews anymore: it’s never been comfortable to slide my body through.
I lost two marriages and three boys. They left in different ways, all of which broke my heart, but God isn’t about to patch any of it back together. I know I made a fool of myself at times, and I know God made a fool of me just as often. I gave up on Him without too much guilt. I tried doing the right thing most of my life, but it wasn’t in the Lord’s house.
Still and all, I know that churchy is the impression I’ve come around to giving. They look at me and listen and think I’m leading them towards the gospel. Everyone has their own curse, and I suppose—for a while at least—Claire saw me fitting in that peculiar box.
She wasn’t a woman with whom I had any dispute. She seemed perfectly fine to me, as gentle- wayed as they come. It wasn’t as if she tried to beat me upside the head with her tears. They came natural, like anyone else. She was embarrassed too, I could tell, with her curtains, her china, her husband painted on the wall, the teacup rattling on her saucer. She looked like she could fly out the window to Park Avenue at any time, with the streak of gray in her hair, her thin, bare arms, her long neck with blue veins. There were university diplomas on the wall in the corridor, and anyone could see that she was born on the right side of the river. She kept her house neat and scrubbed and she had a tiny southern lilt to her voice, so if there was any one of the ladies I felt a kinship with, it was her.
That morning glided by, like most good mornings do.
We had our flipflap with the tightrope man and then we wandered down from the roof and ate the doughnuts and sipped the tea and rattled on some. The living room was flooded with light. The furniture had a deep sheen to it. The ceilings were high and trimmed with a fancy mold-ing. On the shelf, a small four- legged clock in a glass bell. My flowers were sitting in the center of the table. They had already begun to open a little in the heat.
The others were giddy with Park Avenue, I could tell. When Claire disappeared to the kitchen, they kept picking up their cups and glancing at the bottom to see what sort of stamp was there. Janet even lifted a glass ashtray. There were two cigarette butts squeezed into it. She held it up in the air to see if she could find some mark there, like it might have come from Queen Elizabeth herself. I could hardly contain my smile. “Well, you never know,” said Janet, in a fierce whisper. She had a way of flipping McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 291
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her hair sideways without hardly moving her head. She placed the ashtray back down on the table and gave a little sniff as if to say, How dare you. She rearranged her hair with another flick and looked across at Jacqueline. They had the white- woman language going between them, I’ve seen it enough times to know, it’s all in the eyes, they dip a little to the side, they hold the gaze a moment, and then they look away. They got centuries of practice at it—I’m surprised some people aren’t frozen in it.
I glanced towards the kitchen, but Claire was still beyond the louvered door—I could see her thin outline, bustling away, getting more ice. The snap of an ice tray. A running tap.
“Be with you in a jiffy,” she called from the kitchen.
Janet stood and tiptoed over to the portrait on the wall. He was painted very fine, the husband, like a photograph, sitting in an antique chair with his jacket and blue tie on. It was one of those paintings where you’d hardly notice a brushstroke. He was looking out at us very seriously. Bald, with a sharp nose, and a little hint of wattle at his neck. Janet slid up next to the portrait and made a face. “Looks like he’s got a stick up his rear end,” she whispered. It was funny, and true, I suppose, but I couldn’t help but feel a tightening in my chest, thinking that Claire was going to come out of the kitchen at any moment. I said to myself, Say nothing, say nothing, say nothing. Janet reached across and put her hand on the frame of the painting. Marcia had a wicked smile on her face.
Jacqueline was biting her lip. All three of them were on the point of bursting out in laughter.
Janet’s hand moved up along the frame and hovered over his thigh.
Marcia threw herself back on the couch and clasped her mouth as if it was the funniest thing ever to happen. Jacqueline said: “Don’t excite the poor man.”
A hush and a few more giggles. I wondered what might happen if I were the one to get up and touch his knee, run my hand along the inside of his leg—imagine that—but I stayed rooted, of course, to the chair.
We heard the push of the louvered door and Claire was out and about, a big jug of ice water in her hands.
Janet stood away from the painting, Marcia turned into the couch and pretended to cough, and Jacqueline lit herself another cigarette. Claire held the plate out to me. Two bagels and three doughnuts. One with glaz-ing, one with sprinkles, one plain.
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“If I have another doughnut, Claire,” I said, “I’ll spill out into the street.”
That was like letting the air out of a balloon and allowing it to fly around the room. I didn’t mean for it to be that funny, but by all accounts it was, and the room let out a big breath. We soon fell to talking again with our serious faces on—truth, it was good talk, honest talk, remembering our boys, how and what they were, and what they went and fought for. The clock ticked on the shelf near the bookcase and then Claire walked us down the corridor, past the paintings and the university diplomas, to her boy’s room.
She pushed open the door like it was the first time she’d done it in years. It creaked and swung on its hinges.
The room looked as if it had hardly been touched. Pencils, sharpeners, papers, baseball charts. Rows of books on the shelve
s. An oak dresser on tall legs. A Mickey Mantle poster above the bed. A water stain on the ceiling. A creak in the floorboards. It surprised me some, the smallness of the room—it just about fit all five of us. “Let me crack the window ,”
said Claire. I was careful to take the end of the bed where there was most support—I didn’t want it creaking. I put my hands down on the mattress so it wouldn’t bounce and I leaned against the wall where I could feel the cool of the plaster against my back. Janet sat on the beanbag chair—she hardly made a dent in it—and the others took the far end of the bed, while Claire herself took a small white chair by the window where the breeze came in.
“Here we are,” she said.
The sound in her voice like we’d come to the end of a very long journey.
“Well, it’s lovely,” said Jacqueline.
“It really is,” said Marcia.
The ceiling fan spun and the dust settled like little mosquitoes around us. Along the shelves there were lots of radio parts and flat boards with electronic gizmos, wires hanging down. Big batteries. Three screens, their backs open and tubes showing.
“He liked his televisions?” I said.
“Oh, they’re bits of computers,” said Claire.
She reached across and picked up a photo of him in a silver frame on McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 293
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his table, passed it around. The frame was heavy and it had a MADE IN EN -
GLAND sticker on the back velvet. In the photo Joshua was a thin little white boy with pimples on his chin. Dark glasses and short hair. Eyes that weren’t comfortable looking in the camera. He wasn’t in uniform either.
She said it was taken just before his graduation from high school, when he was valedictorian. Jacqueline rolled her eyes again but Claire didn’t notice—every word she said about her son seemed to spread the smile on her face. She picked up a snow globe from his desk, shook it up and down. The globe was from Miami, and I thought, There’s someone with a touch of funny—snow falling over Florida. But when she turned it upside down it was like there was some other gravity in the world: she waited until every little flake had settled and then she turned it again and she told us all about him, Joshua, where he went to school, the notes he liked on the piano, what he was doing for his country, how he read all the books on the shelves, how he even built himself his own adding machine, went to college, then out to some park somewhere—he was the sort of boy who was once liable to put another man on the Moon.
