Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (Blanche White series Book 2)

by Barbara Neely

  She abruptly turned back toward the village. She would wait. She called Tina from the convenience store, then made herself as comfortable as possible on the shallow step outside Stu’s shop. She didn’t know how long she waited. The memory of her helplessness and fear at being attacked kept her sitting and waiting beyond any length of time she would have thought possible.

  Stu laughed and shook his head when he found her sitting there, as though he were both delighted to see her and regretted her presence. He looked older, more angles and shadows in his face. Blanche rose. She concentrated on the litany of all that he had done to her and to others. They stared at each other for a moment more before he spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Blanche. I keep having reasons to say that to you.”

  “Oh, you’re sorry all right. What I want to know is how sorry.”

  He moved to go by her, to open the door.

  “No. We talk right here.” He sat on the stoop at her feet. Passers-by looked at them, some nodded.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Everything, that’s what! Everything.” She stepped onto the pavement in front of him. She looked down on him and was nearly overcome by the urge to kick him and to kick him and kick him until she had kicked out every thought and memory of him. He looked up at her. His face and eyes were sad.

  “I never meant to hurt you, never. I never meant to hurt anyone.”

  Blanche’s laugh was full of disbelief. “That’s why you hit me, pushed me, because you didn’t want to hurt me, you rotten liar, you shit! You coulda killed me!”

  Stu shook his head from side to side, as if to throw off her words. “If I’d wanted to really hurt you, Blanche, I could have. Easily. You just kept showing up in the wrong places. If you’d told me in the beginning that you were mixed up in this mess with Mattie…By the time I realized you were helping her, it was too late.”

  “How did Faith get the anklet?” Blanche asked him.

  “Stole it, of course. I hadn’t looked at it in so long I didn’t even know when it went missing. Don’t ask me how or when she took it. It wasn’t hard. The back door hasn’t been locked for years.”

  “How’d you know she had it?”

  “The last thing she said to me, about a week before she died. She complimented me on my taste in jewelry. It was on the terrace at the Big House. Dave or somebody pointed out that I wasn’t wearing any jewelry. Faith laughed and said it wasn’t my jewelry she meant. That night, I looked in the desk where I’d left the anklet. It was gone and the article, too. Then Faith was dead, and I had to have them back before Al J. sent someone down here to pack up her things, before somebody started going through her stuff and wondering.”

  “But what made you think I had the box instead of Mattie?”

  “The box? I never thought you had the box. I gave up on finding the anklet at Faith’s place when you told me you and Mattie had found the box. I knew Mattie has a safe. I figured that was that. Then I saw the note on your fridge.”

  Blanche was blank for a moment, then remembered the note from Adamson. “That could have been about my anklet.”

  “No. Not once I knew you’d found Faith’s misery box.”

  “But I didn’t have the anklet when you pushed me,” Blanche told him. “Adamson forgot to send it back.”

  Stu made another of those unfunny sounds. “Of course, of course. That’s my luck. Always has been.”

  “You mean the luck you started making when you dumped Susan Moon’s body in…”

  “But I didn’t kill her,” Stu interrupted. “I didn’t! I loved her. She was already dead. I was drunk! I panicked! I loved her!” Stu sunk his head into his hands and rubbed them across his face before he continued.

  “I met her in 1966, in Saigon. Back then, her name was Thuy Duong. Her people were shop owners. Pretty well off and all dead by then. She was able to get out. I couldn’t believe it when I met up with her again in San Francisco. She was alone in the city. So was I. She wasn’t used to it. Neither was I. We got married. We honeymooned crossing the country from San Francisco to Philadelphia—with a side trip up here, to introduce her to my folks.”

  Blanche could almost see memories swirling around him.

  “She was so beautiful.” He raised his hands and stared at them as though the words to describe her were written on his palms. “So delicate. So…I knew Dad would love her, even if she wasn’t black. You know what happened. He was furious when he saw her. When he told me I’d never get the shop if I married outside the race, I couldn’t tell him we were already married! Still, we were happy. I thought she was happy. But I came home one night and she was gone, clothes, toothbrush, everything. Not even a note. I almost went crazy looking for her. I finally found her in Chinatown. She was living in a disgusting old building, working for dimes in a sweatshop, but she wouldn’t come back to me. She was calling herself Susan Moon. Said she wanted a new name to go with her new life. She even bought herself some papers in that name. I tried to get her back, courted her as if we’d just met, dinner, drinks. That’s when I bought the anklet. The night I gave it to her, she said she didn’t want to be married to a man who was ashamed to tell his parents she was his wife. I guess I drank too much. I kept asking her to come back to me. She kept insisting I tell my family about her. Finally, she just got up and walked away. She left the anklet on the table. I sat in the bar for a couple minutes before I realized she hadn’t gone to the bathroom. I caught up with her about a block away. I didn’t call out to her, I just ran up behind her and grabbed her, just grabbed her. If there was something wrong with her heart, she never told me, I swear! She pulled away, pulled away and clutched at her chest. It was over almost before it began.”

  “But why dump her body like she was a bag of trash?”

  Stu stood up and paced the pavement. “I told you, I panicked! I didn’t know what had happened, why she’d died. I couldn’t get involved. What if Dad found out? I told you what he said! I’ve wanted this shop all my life. What if they investigated, found out she was Thuy Duong. I was a drunken black man in Chinatown…The alley was right there. We’d only been in Philly a couple months. She’d made no friends and my friends knew her as Thuy Duong. There was nobody to care, nobody to ask…”

  Blanche walked a few steps away and turned so that she could only see enough of him to know if he made a sudden move. She forced herself to feel only her rage and the possibility that this man was dangerous. Everything else would have to wait. She turned back to Stu.

  “What about Faith? She didn’t have a heart condition.”

  Stu jumped up. “I never touched Faith. I was on the path from the village, headed for the bar at the Big House. When I was close to Faith and Al J.’s place, all the lights inside went out at once. Then I saw Carol hurrying toward Faith’s. She went inside. She was really running when she came out. I walked over to the cottage and called out. No one answered. I could see the door was open. I was tempted to go in, but I told you about my last encounter with Faith. I didn’t want her to catch me snooping around her place, so I left.

  “What did you tell Hank?” she asked him.

  Stu stopped doing whatever it was that he did with his eyes and body that had once made her want to lean closer to him or maybe she just didn’t feel it anymore. He suddenly seemed extremely tired and anxious to get this conversation finished.

  “I saw him later, at the Big House. I told him I’d seen Carol come charging out of Faith’s like she was being chased by the devil. I thought he was going to pass out. He gulped his drink and took off. I followed him. You should have seen our Little Brown Bomber when he came out of Faith’s. Like a guy who’d just been sucker-punched. I knew then that Faith was dead in there somewhere. And it was pretty obvious what he was thinking. I could have told him Carol wasn’t in Faith’s long enough to do Faith any harm. But he brushed right by me when he came out, as if I didn’t exist. Just
like he did when we were kids.”

  Blanche made a disgusted sound. Stu searched her face.

  “You think he killed himself because he thought Carol killed Faith? Stu laughed at the idea. “He’d have killed himself, anyway. He was too weak to live. Too righteous, too pure and decent. He could hardly wait to die.”

  Blanche couldn’t, didn’t want to speak. Everything about him looked phony to her now, that endearing little smile, those eyes that could by turns be sad enough to break your heart and hot enough to melt it. That pillow-soft voice that had wrapped itself lovingly round her now seemed to suck all the air out of the place. She wondered if his tiredness was contagious. All she wanted to do suddenly was sleep, to be unconscious.

  “It’s not over,” she told him. “Mattie deserves to hear what you have to say, too. And I want an apology. In front of her. And I want reparations. Yes, that’s what I want. I don’t know what kind, but reparations.” She moved in closer to him. “And I want this.” She put the force of all her rage and betrayal, the weight of her entire frame behind the fist she drove into his stomach. Air whooshed out of him as though he were a released balloon. He staggered back, gasping for breath. Shock and pain twisted his face. Blanche turned and walked away. “Tomorrow morning at nine. At Mattie’s,” she said over her shoulder.

  Mattie waved to her from her porch and quickly ushered Blanche inside. She demanded to know what was going on, but couldn’t seem to comprehend what Blanche told her.

  “You mean Rudolph’s son, Stu? Have you talked to him about this? No son of Rudolph’s would ever marry…There’s really no proof, you know. Unless your jeweler can identify that anklet.” She looked at Blanche as though she’d never seen her before and was not pleased by what she saw.

  “Do you know how much Stu disliked Hank? He told Hank he saw Carol coming out of Faith’s. He didn’t mention that Carol wasn’t in Faith’s long enough to do anything or that the lights went out before Carol went in. They probably went out when Faith’s radio fell into the tub.”

  Mattie flinched. “I told Rudolph that boy wasn’t wholesome. He took something that belonged to Hank once, something Rudolph and I had…”

  She told Rudolph? She and Rudolph? Lord! What was there about this place that blinded her to what was right in front of her? Didn’t Stu tell her he’d had his father’s pharmacy since last fall? After his father died. And hadn’t he done a doubletake when she’d told him Mattie had said Hank’s father had died last year? “Delia and I were inseparable that year,” Mattie had told her. Of course they were, how else could they pass Mattie’s baby off as Delia’s? It was like Miz Minnie always said, most times, you didn’t have to ask people much, you just had to listen to what they told you.

  “Did Hank know you were his mother? Is that what he meant in his note, about already knowing? I’d forgotten about that. Is that what freaked you? The possibility that your secret might be in Faith’s possession? That Hank might have killed her to protect you, too?”

  “What I did, or did not do, and why, is none of your business.”

  Blanche was glad Mattie didn’t lie, at least she hadn’t done that. All along she’d told the truth. What was important was which truths she’d decided to tell. A retractable bridge, she thought, remembering those few moments when she’d felt that she and Mattie had come together across all that divided them. It had never really happened.

  Mattie hadn’t reached out for a friend, even a temporary one. She’d reached out for someone to help her cover her tracks, to keep her image pure. She’d reached out to someone who was not a part of her set, not likely to be hanging out with folks she cared about, someone who would be excited by stories of a life she would never, ever lead, and pleased to be in the company of a black woman who had. It hadn’t been necessary to spot Mattie points, they weren’t even playing the same game. Blanche laughed, Old Queen Somebody or Another. And whenever there was Queen, there had to be an image to keep up. “Were you afraid people would find out that the warrior woman had a child she didn’t have the courage to claim? I can think of a whole lot of things worse than that. At least you loved him. Or say you did.”

  Mattie’s eyes flew open. She leaned toward Blanche. “How dare you! How dare you question my love for him! You couldn’t possibly understand. I loved him more than life and I will not allow…”

  “I’ll tell you how I dare! You used me like I was one of your pens or paintbrushes. All that talk about “our sort!” I see why nobody’s ever called you girlfriend before. You don’t even know what the word means. I guess you figured I was used to cleaning up other people’s dirt and keeping quiet about it, so why not yours?” Blanche’s hands flew to her hips like soldiers to their battle stations.

  Mattie’s mouth tightened. “I will thank you not to repeat what you think you’ve learned here. It concerns no one beyond these premises.”

  Blanche remembered what Mattie had said about Amber Cove Insiders closing ranks. Rudolph might not have been an Insider in the strictest sense, but he was one of their set. And Mattie’s lover. And Stu was his other son. Blanche suddenly saw a woman, small and very dark, sitting alone in a quiet room. “Did Stu’s mother know? Did you and Rudolph make her ashamed to show her face? Or was she smart enough to turn her back on all you phonies? And what would all those women who think you’re the last word in womanhood have to say about this shit, I wonder?”

  The air was suddenly chilly as a November day.

  Mattie banged her walking stick on the floor. “I will not be spoken to in this manner by some poor, uneducated, ignor…”

  “There’s more than one way to be poor, more than one kind of education, and a whole lot of ways to be ignorant,” Blanche told her. “And you, honey, with your books and pictures and money, your cottage and so forth are poorer, dumber, and more ignorant than I’ll ever be. Too bad you can’t live what you write.” Blanche stared at Mattie until Mattie averted her eyes. Her voice was different when she spoke.

  “If I have offended you, it was unintentional, I assure you.” Mattie’s voice and manner were now strictly under her control.

  Blanche could almost see Mattie painting over the spot where Blanche was standing, eliminating her from consideration.

  “I’d appreciate it, Blanche, if you would be decent…if you would be kind enough to hold what you’ve learned here, what you’ve learned about Hank, about me, in confidence.”

  Blanche savored this small victory, the closest thing to an acknowledgment of Mattie’s maternity and an apology that she was likely to get. She hesitated a while before she answered, enjoying Mattie’s obvious discomfort.

  “I’ll promise you this,” Blanche finally told her, “I’ll never tell any of it to anyone who gives a damn.” She was careful not to slam the door as she left.

  She dragged herself back to the Crowleys’. Tina took one look at her and told the kids they were going to town for fish and chips, so they could just munch some fruit for lunch. She moved her hair braiding out back and told the boys they’d have to play Nintendo with the sound turned down. Blanche fell face down on her bed and cried until she felt as dry inside as an overbaked flounder. When she woke, it was dark and no one was home. She peed and climbed back into bed, thankful for Tina and glad to know she’d be out of this particular nightmare tomorrow. If she dreamt that night, she didn’t remember it in the morning.

  FIFTEEN

  The cottage was quiet when she woke. She didn’t need to look at the clock to know it was quite early: The birds’ songs had that practice quality, as though they were just warming up for the day. The last tendrils of sleep slipped from her brain, leaving her mind at the mercy of memories of the events that had driven her to hide so deep in sleep. She thought of the recurring dream she’d come here hoping to remember. She understood it now in ways that she hadn’t the night she’d finally been able to recall it: It wasn’t just a way of reminding her to prepare for the fut
ure—when the children’s adulthood and the likely death of Mama and other old folks would change the contours of her world. The dream had also been about now. She hugged herself against the memory of people in her dream moving further and further away from her, against that feeling of hollow loneliness that could kill a person. She thought of Mattie and Stu and how they’d both seemed to rush toward her at first, only to have moved so far from her she could hardly see them. And didn’t want to. And won’t, she thought, suddenly positive that she would never see either of them again. She’d foolishly expected Stu and Mattie to be a part of setting her mind at rest since this whole mess started with them. Once again, she’d been wrong. Is that what Madame Rosa had in mind for her, to try to make connections where they couldn’t exist? Maybe she’d misunderstood Madame Rosa. Maybe Madame Rosa had said rejection, not connection. She struggled against the weight of unfinished business and pulled herself out of bed.

  She showered, dressed, ate a pear, and some toast. When the children got up, she fed them, corralled them into the last of their packing, then released them into the out-of-doors. She waited until Tina was in the shower before poking her head in the bathroom to say she was going out and where. She also made herself tell Tina how long she should wait for Blanche’s return before sending Durant to the village after her. Tina peered around the shower curtain with a face full of questions. “I’ll tell you about it when I come back,” Blanche responded. “I promise.” She was aware of having to force herself to tell Tina to send Durant if she was gone too long. She still didn’t want to believe that Stu was dangerous. Yet, one of her children could have opened that bedroom door; or she might have had a bad heart like Susan Moon. He was at least reckless, which was always dangerous.