Miss Kew said, “Gerard, I asked you a question.”
“Keep your pants on,” I said. “I got find out, don’t I? Yes, if that’s what you want, we’ll listen to Miriam, too.”
Miss Kew turned to Miriam. “You hear that, Miriam?”
Miriam looked at Miss Kew and at us and shook her head. Then she held out her hands a bit to Bonnie and Beanie.
They went right to her. Each one took hold of a hand. They looked up at her and grinned. They were probably planning some sort of hellishness, but I guess they looked sort of cute. Miriam’s mouth twitched and I thought for a second she was going to look human. She said, “All right, Miss Kew.”
Miss Kew walked over and handed her the baby and she started upstairs with him. Miss Kew herded us along after Miriam. We all went upstairs.
They went to work on us then and for three years they never stopped.
“That was hell,” I said to Stern.
“They had their work cut out.”
“Yeah, I s’pose they did. So did we. Look, we were going to do exactly what Lone said. Nothing on earth could of stopped us from doing it. We were tied and bound to doing every last little thing Miss Kew said to do. But she and Miriam never seemed to understand that. I guess they felt they had to push every inch of the way. All they had to do was make us understand what they wanted, and we’d of done it. That’s okay when it’s something like telling me not to climb into bed with Janie.
“Miss Kew raised holy hell over that. You’d of thought I’d robbed the Crown Jewels, the way she acted. But when it’s something like, ‘You must behave like little ladies and gentlemen,’ it just doesn’t mean a thing. And two out of three orders she gave us were like that. ‘Ah-ah!’ she’d say. ‘Language, language!’ For the longest time I didn’t dig that at all. I finally asked her what the hell she meant, and then she finally come out with it. But you see what I mean.”
“I certainly do,” Stern said. “Did it get easier as time went on?”
“We only had real trouble twice, once about the twins and once about Baby. That one was real bad.”
“What happened?”
“About the twins? Well, when we’d been there about a week or so we began to notice something that sort of stunk. Janie and me, I mean. We began to notice that we almost never got to see Bonnie and Beanie. It was like that house was two houses, one part for Miss Kew and Janie and me, and the other part for Miriam and the twins. I guess we’d have noticed it sooner if things hadn’t been such a hassle at first, getting into new clothes and making us sleep all the time at night, and all that. But here was the thing: We’d all get turned out in the side yard to play, and then along comes lunch, and the twins got herded off to eat with Miriam while we ate with Miss Kew. So Janie said, ‘Why don’t the twins eat with us?’
“ ‘Miriam’s taking care of them, dear,’ Miss Kew says.
“Janie looked at her with those eyes. ‘I know that. Let ’em eat here and I’ll take of ’em.’
“Miss Kew’s mouth got all tight again and she said, ‘They’re little colored girls, Jane. Now eat your lunch.’
“But that didn’t explain anything to Jane or me, either. I said, ‘I want ’em to eat with us. Lone said we should stay together.’
“ ‘But you are together,’ she says. ‘We all live in the same house. We all eat the same food. Now let us not discuss the matter.’
“I looked at Janie and she looked at me, and she said, ‘So why can’t we all do this livin’ and eatin’ right here?’
“Miss Kew put her fork down and looked hard. ‘I have explained it to you and I have said that there will be no further discussion.’
“Well, I thought that was real nowhere. So I just rocked back my head and bellowed, ‘Bonnie! Beanie!’ And bing, there they were.
“So all hell broke loose. Miss Kew ordered them out and they wouldn’t go, and Miriam come steaming in with their clothes, and she couldn’t catch them, and Miss Kew got to honking at them and finally at me. She said this was too much. Well, maybe she had had a hard week, but so had we. So Miss Kew ordered us to leave.
“I went and got Baby and started out, and along came Janie and the twins. Miss Kew waited till we were out the door and next thing you know she ran out after us. She passed us and got in front of me and made me stop. So we all stopped.
“ ‘Is this how you follow Lone’s wishes?’ she asked.
“I told her yes. She said she understood Lone wanted us to stay with her. And I said, ‘Yeah, but he wanted us to stay together more.’
“She said come back in, we’d have a talk. Jane asked Baby and Baby said okay, so we went back. We had a compromise. We didn’t eat in the dining room no more. There was a side porch, a sort of verandah thing with glass windows, with a door to the dining room and a door to the kitchen, and we all ate out there after that. Miss Kew ate by herself.
“But something funny happened because of that whole cockeyed hassle.”
“What was that?” Stern asked me.
I laughed. “Miriam. She looked and sounded like always, but she started slipping us cookies between meals. You know, it took me years to figure out what all that was about. I mean it. From what I’ve learned about people, there seems to be two armies fightin’ about race. One’s fightin’ to keep ’em apart, and one’s fightin’ to get ’em together. But I don’t see why both sides are so worried about it! Why don’t they just forget it?”
“They can’t. You see, Gerry, it’s necessary for people to believe they are superior in some fashion. You and Lone and the kids—you were a pretty tight unit. Didn’t you feel you were a little better than all of the rest of the world?”
“Better? How could we be better?”
“Different, then.”
“Well, I suppose so, but we didn’t think about it. Different, yes. Better, no.”
“You’re a unique case,” Stern said. “Now go on and tell me about the other trouble you had. About Baby.”
“Baby. Yeah. Well, that was a couple of months after we moved to Miss Kew’s. Things were already getting real smooth, even then. We’d learned all the ‘yes, ma’am, no, ma’am’ routines by then and she’d got us catching up with school—regular periods morning and afternoon, five days a week. Jane had long ago quit taking care of Baby, and the twins walked to wherever they went. That was funny. They could pop from one place to another right in front of Miss Kew’s eyes and she wouldn’t believe what she saw. She was too upset about them suddenly showing up bare. They quit doing it and she was happy about it. She was happy about a lot of things. It had been years since she’d seen anybody—years. She’d even had the meters put outside the house so no one would ever have to come in. But with us there, she began to liven up. She quit wearing those old-lady dresses and began to look halfway human. She ate with us sometimes, even.
“But one fine day I woke up feeling real weird. It was like somebody had stolen something from me when I was asleep, only I didn’t know what. I crawled out of my window and along the ledge into Janie’s room, which I wasn’t supposed to do. She was in bed. I went and woke her up. I can still see her eyes, the way they opened a little slit, still asleep, and then popped up wide. I didn’t have to tell her something was wrong. She knew, and she knew what it was.
”‘Baby’s gone!’ she said.
“We didn’t care then who woke up. We pounded out of her room and down the hall and into the little room at the end where Baby slept. You wouldn’t believe it. The fancy crib he had, and the white chest of drawers, and all that mess of rattles and so on, they were gone, and there was just a writing desk there. I mean it was as if Baby had never been there at all.
“We didn’t say anything. We just spun around and busted into Miss Kew’s bedroom. I’d never been in there but once and Jane only a few times. But forbidden or not, this was different. Miss Kew was in bed, with her hair braided. She was wide awake before we could get across the room. She pushed herself back and up until she was sitting against the head
board. She gave the two of us the cold eye.
“ ‘What is the meaning of this?’ she wanted to know.
“ ‘Where’s Baby?’ I yelled at her.
“ ‘Gerard,’ she says, ‘there is no need to shout.’
“Jane was a real quiet kid, but she said, ‘You better tell us where he is, Miss Kew,’ and it would of scared you to look at her when she said it.
“So all of a sudden Miss Kew took off the stone face and held out her hands to us. ‘Children,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I really am sorry. But I’ve just done what is best. I’ve sent Baby away. He’s gone to live with some children like him. We could never make him really happy here. You know that.
“Jane said, ‘He never told us he wasn’t happy.’
“Miss Kew brought out a hollow kind of laugh. ‘As if he could talk, the poor little thing!’
“ ‘You better get him back here,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what you’re fooling with. I told you we wasn’t ever to break up.’
“She was getting mad, but she held on to herself. ‘I’ll try explain it to you, dear,’ she said. ‘You and Jane here and even the twins are all normal, healthy children and you’ll grow up to be fine men and women. But poor Baby’s—different. He’s not going to grow very much more, and he’ll never walk and play like other children.’
“ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘You had no call to send him away.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah. You better bring him back, but quick.’
“Then she started to jump salty. ‘Among the many things I have taught you is, I am sure, not to dictate to your elders. Now, then, you run along and get dressed for breakfast, and we’ll say no more about this.’
“I told her, nice as I could, ‘Miss Kew, you’re going to wish you brought him back right now. But you’re going to bring him back soon. Or else.’
“So then she got up out of her bed and ran us out of the room.”
I was quiet a while, and Stern asked, “What happened?”
“Oh,” I said, “she brought him back.” I laughed suddenly. “I guess it’s funny now, when you come to think of it. Nearly three months of us getting bossed around, and her ruling the roost, and then all of a sudden we lay down the law. We’d tried our best to be good according to her ideas, but, by God, that time she went too far. She got the treatment from the second she slammed her door on us. She had a big china pot under her bed, and it rose up in the air and smashed through her dresser mirror. Then one of the drawers in the dresser slid open and a glove come out of it and smacked her face.
“She went to jump back on the bed and a whole section of plaster fell off the ceiling onto the bed. The water turned on in her little bathroom and the plug went in, and just about the time it began to overflow, all her clothes fell of their hooks. She went to run out of the room, but the door was stuck, and when she yanked on the handle it opened real quick and she spread out on the floor. The door slammed shut again and more plaster come down on her. Then we went back in and stood looking at her. She was crying. I hadn’t known till then that she could.
“ ‘You going to get Baby back here?’ I asked her.
“She just lay there and cried. After a while she looked up at us. It was real pathetic. We helped her up and got her to a chair. She just looked at us for a while, and at the mirror, and at the busted ceiling, and then she whispered, ‘What happened? What happened?’
“ ‘You took Baby away,’ I said. ‘That’s what.’
“So she jumped up and said real low, real scared, but real strong: ‘Something struck the house. An airplane. Perhaps there was an earthquake. We’ll talk about Baby after breakfast.’
“I said, ‘Give her more, Janie.’
“A big gob of water hit her on the face and chest and made her nightgown stick to her, which was the kind of thing that upset her most. Her braids stood straight up in the air, more and more, till they dragged her standing straight up. She opened her mouth to yell and the powder puff off the dresser rammed into it. She clawed it out.
“ ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ she says, crying again.
“Janie just looked at her, and put her hands behind her, real smug. ‘We haven’t done anything,’ she said.
“And I said, ‘Not yet we haven’t. You going to get Baby back?’
“And she screamed at us, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop talking about that mongoloid idiot! It’s no good to anyone, not even itself! How could I ever make believe it’s mine?’
“I said, ‘Get rats, Janie.’
“There was a scuttling sound along the baseboard. Miss Kew covered her face with her hands and sank down on the chair. ‘Not rats,’ she said. ‘There are no rats here.’ Then something squeaked and she went all to pieces. Did you ever see anyone really go to pieces?”
“Yes,” Stern said.
“I was about as mad as I could get,” I said, “but that was almost too much for me. Still, she shouldn’t have sent Baby away. It took a couple of hours for her to get straightened out enough so she could use the phone, but we had Baby back before lunch time.” I laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“She never seemed able to rightly remember what had happened to her. About three weeks later I heard her talking to Miriam about it. She said it was the house settling suddenly. She said it was a good thing she’d sent Baby out for that medical checkup—the poor little thing might have been hurt. She really believed it, I think.”
“She probably did. That’s fairly common. We don’t believe anything we don’t want to believe.”
“How much of this do you believe?” I asked him suddenly.
“I told you before—it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to believe or disbelieve it.”
“You haven’t asked me how much of it I believe.”
“I don’t have to. You’ll make up your own mind about that.”
“Are you a good psychotherapist?”
“I think so,” he said. “Whom did you kill?”
The question caught me absolutely off guard. “Miss Kew,” I said. Then I started to cuss and swear. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What did you do it for?”
“That’s what I came here to find out.”
“You must have really hated her.”
I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that!
He gave me time to get it all out. The first part of it came out in noises, grunts and squeaks that hurt my throat. Much more than you’d think came out when my nose started to run. And finally—words.
“Do you know where I came from? The earliest thing I can remember is a punch in the mouth. I can still see it coming, a fist as big as my head. Because I was crying. I been afraid to cry ever since. I was crying because I was hungry. Cold, maybe. Both. After that, big dormitories, and whoever could steal the most got the most. Get the hell kicked out of you if you’re bad, get a big reward if you’re good. Big reward: they let you alone. Try to live like that. Try to live so the biggest, most wonderful thing in the whole damn world is just to have ’em let you alone!
“So a spell with Lone and kids. Something wonderful: you belong. It never happened before. Two yellow bulbs and a fireplace and they light up the world. It’s all there is and all there ever has to be.
“Then the big change: clean clothes, cooked food, five hours a day school; Columbus and King Arthur and a 1925 book on Civics that explains about septic tanks. Over it all a great big square-cut lump of ice, and you watch it melting and the corners curve, and you know it’s because of you, Miss Kew … hell, she had too much control over herself ever to slobber over us, but it was there, that feeling. Lone took care of us because it was part of the way he lived. Miss Kew took care of us, and none of it was the way she lived. It was something she wanted to do.
“She had a weird idea of ‘right’ and a wrong idea of ‘wrong,’ but she stuck to them, tried to make her ideas do us good. When she couldn’t understand,
she figured it was her own failure … and there was an almighty lot she didn’t understand and never could. What went right was our success. What went wrong was her mistake. That last year, that was … oh, good.”
“So?”
“So I killed her. Listen,” I said. I felt like I had to talk fast. I wasn’t short of time, but I had to get rid of it. “I’ll tell you all I know about it. The one day before I killed her. I woke up in the morning and the sheets crackly clean under me, the sunlight coming in through white curtains and bright red-and-blue drapes. There’s a closet full of my clothes—mine, you see; I never had anything that was really mine before—and downstairs Miriam clinking around with breakfast and the twins laughing. Laughing with her, mind you, not just with each other like they always did before.
“In the next room, Janie moving around, singing, and when I see her, I know her face will shine inside and out. I get up. There’s hot hot water and the toothpaste bites my tongue. The clothes fit me and I go downstairs and they’re all there and I’m glad to see them and they’re glad to see me, and we no sooner get set around the table when Miss Kew comes down and everyone calls out to her at once.
“And the morning goes by like that, school with a recess, there in the big long living room. The twins with the ends of their tongues stuck out, drawing the alphabet instead of writing it, and then Janie, when it’s time, painting a picture, a real picture of a cow with trees and a yellow fence that goes off into the distance. Here I am lost between the two parts of a quadratic equation, and Miss Kew bending close to help me, and I smell the sachet she has on her clothes. I hold up my head to smell it better, and far away I hear the shuffle and klunk of filled pots going on the stove back in the kitchen.
“And the afternoon goes by like that, more school and some study and boiling out into the yard, laughing. The twins chasing each other, running on their two feet to get where they want to go; Jane dappling the leaves in her picture, trying to get it just the way Miss Kew says it ought to be. And Baby, he’s got a big play-pen. He don’t move around much any more, he just watches and dribbles some, and gets packed full of food and kept as clean as a new sheet of tinfoil.
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