by Dorothy West
“Cleo,” said Bart, looking into her eyes, “you make a mighty bellow for a woman. But you always did remind me of a barking dog. Your bite ain’t really in it, just your cussedness.”
Her eyes fell. “Nobody asked for your opinion.”
“About Springfield,” Bart said blandly, “like I said, I came to stay a week and got a smell of the market. My second day there I was learning my trade from a Mr. Lapham, had a wholesale place, taught me everything he knew about fruit except how to ripen bananas. I taught myself and then I taught him. Wasn’t so many bananas those days. If Mr. Lapham had as much as fifty bunches and sold forty before they rotted, he called himself lucky.
“I worked up to be his buyer, then I left him and opened a retail store with the money I’d been saving to take to Boston. I put Noble Tilman in charge. He was the grandson of Ma’s uncle. Wasn’t much to him, but he was a relative, and I thought I could trust him because he was. I’ve always been a man liked the buying end. I got to be out roaming the market, waiting for boats to dock or trains to pull in, smelling the sea and the cinders, and testing produce with these hands of mine that God has blessed to see the heart of fruit.”
“You ought to learn to stay in your store and watch your cash box,” Cleo said darkly. “Money is an awful temptation. Noble Tilman stole from you right and left. Persuaded you to open that ice-cream parlor so he could steal more. You letting him bank for you and keep your books, and he was banking in his pocket and keeping a white woman. Now a body has to beg you for every dollar. It makes my blood boil to hear Noble Tilman’s name.”
“Let the dead rest,” Bart said. “God punished Noble when He struck him down with galloping consumption. And Noble made his peace before he died. Spent his last night on earth on his knees in prayer behind his locked door, begging God for a vision. Never will forget that Saturday night. None of us could sleep a wink. When we did fall asleep, it was daylight. And when we woke and went to see Noble, he was gone. And some bug-eyed child come running to tell us Noble was in church preaching the word of God.
“When we got there, Noble was near purification. His face was shining like a star. ‘Vanity, all is vanity. I will destroy and make desolate.’ Those were his last known words. He came down from the pulpit and walked down the aisle. Nobody stirred. Nobody put out a hand to stop him. He was God’s messenger. Ma was the one started the singing. She could sing long meter till you’d want to cry. I reckon forty sinners got up and hit the trail.
“Noble went down to my stores and took his fists and smashed the plate-glass window in my ice-cream parlor. Then he climbed inside and tore through my two stores like God’s wrath. In half an hour he destroyed everything in his path. When the policemen finally got there, wasn’t nothing left standing. And Noble was dead when they put him in the wagon.
“It took every penny I could rake and scrape together to pay my creditors. And Ma was never really the same after that. I think what it was, she was worried in her conscience. I was her son and she grieved for me, but Noble had done God’s bidding, and she wouldn’t condemn God’s mysterious ways. I buried her in the spring, and came on to Boston with my faith and five dollars. I been after the Almighty Dollar all my life, and I’ll sprinkle salt on its tail before I die.”
Lily looked happy. She believed in Mr. Judson completely. He was a wonderful man. He didn’t drink or smoke or swear bad. He was kind to women and children. He came home at dusk before she could grow afraid of the dark. If she never got in his way and did her best to please him, she would be safe forever under his wing.
To Charity this was Cleo’s man talking, not hers. She was a poor relation. She and her child were nameless. It was as if they had sprung into being in Boston, one to be called Cleo’s sister, the other Judy’s cousin. And there was no help for it, nowhere to go.
Serena jumped up and said earnestly: “Mr. Judson I’m going to get a job. Watching for the postman isn’t feeding me or my child. Cleo’s always preaching pride. It’s time I got some and took my hand out of your pocket.”
“We-ell,” Bart said cautiously, “it might help to take your mind off your troubles. Work’s been many a man’s salvation.”
Cleo rose, too, and began to pile the plates with vicious bangs. Lily made a nervous start toward helping, but Cleo’s angry eye glued her back to her chair. Cleo leaned over the table and reached for Bart’s plate. Her knuckles were white as she gripped it. Her face was very close to his, and, as always, in her hot anger her beauty had a look of abandon. Bart felt his own rage rising that she wore this look when hate was in her, and contempt was on her tongue.
“Mister Nigger,” she said venomously, “why don’t you speak out plain instead of hiding behind pious words? Yes, encourage Serena to go to work and leave her child for me to take care of. I’ve got my own child to bring up, and this big house besides, and a hard spell of sickness behind me. But what do you care so long as Serena brings home a few dirty dollars for you to snatch from her.” She added accusingly, “You were the one was going to pay Lily so fast. That was last summer, and from that time to this you haven’t paid her one penny.”
“Good God,” thundered Bart, “with all of you here together, that makes a mighty difference.”
“Oh, it does,” agreed Lily wretchedly. “Oh, Cleo, what you want to stir up Mr. Judson for? First I heard tell about any money. Don’t think I put Cleo up to asking, Mr. Judson. The little I do in this house I’m paid a hundred times over.”
“Oh, hush up, both of you,” said Cleo, who was highly annoyed that Bart and Lily were chewing on a part of her argument that she had just thrown in for meanness. Lily wouldn’t have got the money anyway, wouldn’t even have known it was hers to have. So why didn’t she mind her own business? She picked up the pile of dishes and flung away to the sink, where Serena had the dishpan waiting, leaving Lily in an agony to help to show Mr. Judson her industry, but not quite daring to cross Cleo’s line of vision.
“Serena,” said Cleo, “it isn’t your fault Pa was poor, and all of us had to get out and scuffle before we had enough schooling. But all you know, all any of us know, is how to cook and clean for white folks. I don’t want the children to see us humbled. Mr. Judson’s been talking poor mouth ever since I married him. It’s like this every winter. And there never was a winter that didn’t ease into spring.”
“Cleo,” Bart said quietly, “it’s different this winter. There’s a war.”
“My God,” said Cleo, in complete exasperation, “what has a war way over in Europe got to do with a handful of niggers in a house in Boston?”
There was a sudden sob from Serena. She flung the dishcloth in the pan and beat her hands on the sink.
“Serena!” said Cleo sharply. The others stared in horror.
“Why did I ever have Tim? I never wanted a baby. I knew me and Robert was too poor. And then like a fool I got caught. After that it was struggle, struggle, struggle. Even Tim had to struggle to live. He cost us more than Robert could make. I got so I lived for Cleo’s letters. I let Robert see I lived for them. There was old ladies would nurse Tim for a dollar a week while I went out to work. But most of the time I sat on my lazy bottom and waited for the postman. It took me these months of easy living to learn that I wish I was back down home working steady in the white folks kitchen, knowing at night I was coming home to my husband.”
“A woman and man ain’t nothing apart. You mighty right,” said Bart.
Cleo’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. Whenever Serena and Bart agreed on whatever subject, she saw them as connivers. She had never got over, and never would get over, Serena’s supreme duplicity in giving to Bart the twenty dollars that Mr. Van Ryper had refused as in excess of the rent. Anyone with a grain of common sense would have brought that twenty dollars upstairs and slipped it under her sick sister’s pillow, and kept her mouth shut about a matter that was none of her business. Serena had cut off a source of revenue that she might have made use of for months before Mr. Judson caught up with her.
“Oh, hush up,” she said crossly. “Here come the children. I get tired of them hearing you all running off at the mouth.”
CHAPTER 24
THE CHILDREN hung over Bart, Tim between his knees, giving little pats to the loved face, Vicky on the back rung of his chair, with her arms around his neck and her butterfly kisses lighting on his bald spot whenever Cleo’s eyes were elsewhere, and Penny and Judy nestling in the crook of his arms.
“Anybody would think you were molasses,” said Cleo, drying dishes vigorously and passing them to Lily, who always made a little prayer that she would not drop them.
Bart, reading her mind, said placatingly, “They only hang around me to hear my harmonica.”
“Play for us,” coaxed Vicky, leaning over Bart’s head to reach into his vest pocket. Her hair fell over his face, and he wriggled his nose where it tickled, to Tim’s extravagant enjoyment.
Vicky produced the harmonica and stuck it between his teeth. He freed his arms, made some lovely flute sounds, then asked, “What you want the professor to play?”
“Jingle bells,” they chorused.
Charity laughed merrily from her seat at the kitchen table where she was dicing celery.
“I was hoping you’d ask me to play my best piece,” Bart said gravely.
“I will, Papa,” said Judy quickly. “Please play ‘The Mocking Bird.’ ”
He swung into a spirited rendition. His mustached mouth flew up and down the harmonica, extracting a full orchestration from the reeds and filling the room with grace and gaiety.
The cousins clapped their approval, Vicky almost toppling from her perch.
“I declare, Mr. Judson,” said Charity, whose tiny feet had been keeping time, “you make that mouth-organ sing.”
“Papa can sing as good as his harmonica,” Judy said proudly. “Please sing, Papa.”
He hid his smile. “Well, what you want Caruso to sing?”
“ ‘Good Morning Carrie,’ ” said Penny eagerly, jigging up and down.
“Me first!” shouted Vicky, startling Bart’s ear.
“Me second then,” said Penny firmly.
“I don’t care if I’m last,” said Judy, to save her pride. “It’s more polite.”
“Me, Man?” asked Tim anxiously, because they had explained to him before that “Good Morning, Carrie” was not a song for a boy.
Bart took Tim’s fingers and let them travel up his chest to his collarbone. “There. I’ve got your song right here. No way for it not to come out next.”
He played a flourish on his harmonica for effect. Then the love song lilted in his throat with his special variation.
Good morning, Vicky,
How you do this morning?
Been dreaming ’bout you, my pretty maid.
Say look here, Vicky,
When you going to marry me?
And Vicky, who had been breathing excitedly down Bart’s neck in anticipation of her cue, croaked hoarsely,
Long springtime, honey,
Good morning, babe!
When it was time for Tim to be sung to, Bart looked down at this unwanted tiny one, saw the worship in the starry eyes, and muted his voice to lullaby tenderness.
Sweetest little feller everybody knows,
Don’t know what to call him, he’s so mighty lak a rose,
Looking at his mammy, eyes so shiny blue,
Makes you think that heaven is mighty close to you.
“That was me, Man,” said Tim, looking beatified. He climbed on the front rung of Bart’s chair, digging his elbows in Bart’s knees for balance, and clasped him tightly around the neck, his arms entangling with Vicky’s.
It seemed to Bart that sometimes he had to wade through a sea of children to get to his own child. And the little loving hands that clung to him on the way could not be brushed aside by any man who believed that Jesus spoke sublimely when He said, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.
All the same his sleep was troubled. Wasn’t anybody but John D. Rockefeller could support a houseful of folks and not feel it. And wasn’t any real use complaining to Cleo. She would say he was only getting old and cranky. Didn’t she know what helped to keep a man young? The nearness of a wife, the falling asleep beside a familiar body, the knowing that this was their island of the night.
“Well, that’s that,” said Cleo, hanging the dish towels on the rack. “And if you’ll call a halt to your singing bee, Mr. Judson, I’ll clear the kitchen of children, and we’ll get started.”
“Cleo,” Penny wooed in her most appealing voice, “may I speak a piece for the company tonight?”
“You’ll speak it in bed. I won’t take any foolishness tonight. I want you all to go to sleep on the dot of seven.”
“May we just peek at Dean Galloway once?” begged Judy.
“What do you know or care about Calloway, or Galloway, whichever it is.”
“It’s Galloway,” said Judy, in her serious way. “He’s the dean of a college where everybody’s colored. He didn’t want to write Simeon a letter, so he came to see him instead. I don’t know about what.”
“About begging for money,” Cleo said, ignoring Judy and addressing the grown-ups. “What else would he come up North for? Nobody coming here tonight is coming for his sake, anyway. They’re coming to see Simeon’s wife. Poor Thea. Simeon lying on velvet, and Thea lying on straw.”
“Well,” said Bart practically, “Thea and Cole couldn’t hold on to her inheritance.”
“That’s why I hate to tell you anything. You tell it back so mean-like. They didn’t throw away that money. They spent most of it on old Mrs. Hartnett’s sickness.”
“I still don’t see,” argued Bart, “how come Cole was making ends meet until Thea married him.”
“He was making ends meet by redcapping and gambling. You know that. Now he’s just another poor colored doctor.”
She was suddenly aware of the gaping children and turned on them angrily. “You children get from under foot and go on upstairs. I declare, when you’re off by yourselves, we can’t hear ourselves think. But you come around us, and you could hear a pin drop, you’re so busy taking it all in.”
“I was going to excuse myself, anyway,” said Vicky with dignity, though the intention had just popped into her mind. “I have to go to the bathroom. Please excuse me.” She turned to leave under her own authority.
“One minute, miss,” said Cleo severely. “You’ve got to get out of that bad habit of going to the bathroom. If you can’t control yourself at home, you’ll go in public places and get germs. Only men go to the bathroom all the time, anyway.”
“I still have to go,” said Vicky stubbornly.
“I do, too,” said Penny, because all this talk had made her think she wanted to.
“And so do I,” said Judy loyally.
“Me do,” Tim said stoutly.
“Then run along,” said Bart over Cleo’s beginning protest. “Quick. March!”
They threw him a look of love and left.
“Letting them go to the bathroom every time they say they have to,” Cleo muttered. She turned a cold eye on Bart. “I’ll thank you not to spoil them, Mr. Judson.”
CHAPTER 25
FROM THE DISTANCE came the muffled sound of the sunset cannon. Silently and softly the winter dusk descended. The lamplighter, in the bulge of his woolen wrappings, set his wand to the street and sprinkled his stars in glass globes.
In the Judson house everything was in readiness. The wild disorder in the upstairs sitting room had been cleared away. The best gifts had been left on prominent display, and the lesser ones, in the main Bart’s, had been herded toward the rear of the tree. The tree had been lighted for the expectant children at first dark. The dozens of little candles had gleamed five minutes, with the children looking rapt and the grown-ups racked, and had then been snuffed out with unceremonious haste before the house and everybody in it caught fire. This ritual would take place nightly as l
ong as the wretched candles lasted, with the grown-ups wishing Christmas week were a year away instead of now.
With the last rite of the day concluded, the children were tucked by the fire in Cleo’s room with supper trays and a sleepy feeling that was going to keep them from staying awake to express defiance of Cleo’s curfew.
Bart’s bedroom on the second floor, habitually kept closed from public view because of its ugly meager furnishings that Cleo had bought with haste and disinterest at the shabbiest of second-hand stores, and Bart’s fruit smell that was worse in winter with his barred window and his unwillingness to bathe in brisk weather, had been turned into a scented bower for the ladies, with something borrowed from each room upstairs, including Lily’s bed.
The bathroom, next Bart’s room, stood open, too. Every faucet sparkled, the marble and porcelain glistened. The snowy starched curtains at the window stuck out like ballet skirts. The rug had been beaten with such vigor that the worn spots showed. But the tub did not betray its secret — that the bath water usually refused to flow out until it was given a swoosh with the suction pump past some unyielding toy belonging to Tim.
The money that Cleo squeezed out of Bart for repairs was almost always spent otherwise. And she, who was jack-of-all-trades and master of none, did a poor patch job with makeshift materials.
The playroom, on the other side of the bathroom, with its scuffed floors and washed spots on the wallpaper, showed the hard use to which it had been subjected, despite the spit and polish. The dining-room ceiling beneath bore faint fissures in its plaster from the incredible tonnage of paperweight children and scale-size toys.
The moon, growing bigger and brighter, skimmed toward the center of the sky. At just past eight the guests began to arrive. The storm door was open, the street door was on latch. Cleo, her aliveness like a flame, wore wine-red velvet with long sleeves and low bodice. Her shining hair was wound in a coronet. There were pearls in her ears, Bart’s Christmas gift, a dusting of powder on her face, and her untouched lips and cheeks were glowing with health and happiness.
