Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  Suddenly he halted. His head dropped and he might have been inspecting his polished shoes, the crase in his trousers or the linoleum’s gay pattern. But really he was watching the slow dissolution of his dream: the white house with Grecian columns and stained-glass bathroom windows crumbling before it was even built, the flamboyant tree withering before it could take root. He moaned, breaking inside as the dream broke. Yet, as the moan tapered into a sigh, something else emerged. That sigh expressed a profound relief. It was as though Silla, by selling the land, had unwittingly spared him the terrible onus of wresting a place in life. The pretense was over. He was broken, stripped, but delivered . . .

  And something else underlined that sigh: the same unnatural acceptance that had scored his bitter outburst when he was refused the job in accounting. Perhaps he sensed that, like his defeat then, his loss of the land now was simply his due. Moreover, it brought a kind of perverse gratification, a terrifying exultation. There were sins, perhaps, lodged in him and charging the air around him that demanded his perpetual sacrifice.

  “Deighton,” Silla called softly. She had stopped when he had, her triumph slowly changing to suspicion, to uneasiness and then concern. Her hand lifted now in an almost tender gesture, “Deighton, you can always buy a piece of ground home when we catch our hand here,” she reasoned gently. “What was the use of having land there doing nothing?”

  She waited for a time and then added with a cautious laugh, “I know you. As soon as you got home you’d be ready to come back. You cun live on no small island after living in New York. But we can still buy land home if you want. Later.” She paused, hoping for some response, but he was a hollow man with dead eyes. His still pose suggested that even his heart had stopped and his breath lay trapped in his lungs.

  “Deighton.” She leaned toward him, frightened. “We’ll talk later, nuh?—and then come Monday we’ll take the draft to the bank in New York and get the money. You hear? Come Monday.”

  “Yes,” he finally murmured, lifting his empty eyes, “come Monday, please God.”

  V

  Monday morning Deighton sauntered into the kitchen, smiling and darkly handsome in a gray suit, dove-gray hat and gray suede shoes. His skin glowed and the rough hair lay smooth over his head. His assured pose matched his dress. The charming smile declared that he knew how well his clothes fitted, how smooth his skin looked, knew the astonished and shy delight he inspired in Selina and Ina at the table. This time he did not pause in the doorway, unnerved by the kitchen’s whiteness, but strode in as if it were a drawing room filled with people eagerly awaiting him.

  He went up to the mother, who was seated across from the children, and rested his hand familiarly on her shoulder. Strangely she submitted to the caress. A kind of stunned peace draped her figure, shrouded her eyes and lent a softness to her face.

  “What!” he cried pleasantly. “I dress and you like you not even wake yet?”

  She said nothing and he winked across at the puzzled children. “What wrong with yuh mother, nuh? She like she still sleeping.” And his fingers brushed her skin again. “Come, Silla, don let’s wait till the subway get crowded and all those people be breathing their germs up in yuh face.”

  She took a sip of the tea; something in her struggled to shrug off his hand, her lips moved to reply but no sound came.

  He bent and said in a loud yet intimate whisper, “You know how sweet you and that subway does hitch up . . .” then flashed the children a wide smile. “Did I ever tell wunna ’bout yuh mother and the subway?” He waited for their reply and finally leaned over and snapped his fingers in their faces. “Lord, wunna like yuh sleeping too . . . Well, lemma tell yuh.

  “This was before either of you born. Yuh mother and I was what yuh call courting and I took her to some big movie downtown (I was one man believe in spending money on a woman I like). Well, we sat up like swells in the big movie house and laugh our guts full, and then come back home on the subway. When we come upstairs at yuh mother stop, she took a sudden fright. I ask her what was wrong. And yuh know what—she din know where she was. The head had turn completely from the subway. I had to lead she the way you would lead a child . . .” He waited and then burst out laughing at their uncertain smiles. “The head turn now . . .” he chuckled, going to the window and looking out at the denuded back yard.

  “Yuh know, people does say they don like Monday. They does call it blue Monday ’cause another week of work begins. But I did always love a Monday. Like take today. I feel good! I sleep the sleep of the just last night and I ready for the day. I had a sweet sleep—a sleep like I ain had in years!”

  He sat down on the window ledge and stretched his legs. With a roguish smile he asked, “Silla, you did sleep good?” not looking at her but at the tips of his shoes. “Silla, I ask if you did sleep good . . .”

  “But watch yuh mouth, do . . .” she cried, but without her usual vehemence.

  He turned to Selina, laughing. “Yuh see yuh mother there, lady-folks? That’s the way she was when we was courting. Never a hard word. A look on her face that did make you think of Jesus meek and mild. Her head always down. I tell yuh, I never even knew what her eyes look like for the longest time. And then one day she raised them. Lord-God, I felt like Paul on the road to Damascus when the light of the Lord struck him and he fell down blind-blind! And lady-folks, I ain recover yet!”

  Selina smiled despite her profound puzzlement, and across from her the mother hid her own helpless smile by raising the cup to her lips. Deighton strolled back to her chair and placed his fingers on her neck and said with a said smile, “And yuh mother had skin like none I ever touch. It was always cool to yuh hand no matter how hot the day. Come,” he said tenderly, “let’s go to New York and get yuh money.”

  “Wait, nuh,” she pleaded dully, “lemme finish the little tea, and you best eat somethin’ too instead of performing like you’s on a stage.”

  He stepped back into a grandiloquent pose. “What I need with food when I has feed on the food of gods last . . .”

  “Oh God, yuh don know shame.”

  “Come then, le’s go. I got to work today. You acting all of a sudden like yuh don want the money.” He appealed to Selina and Ina. “Lady-folks, yuh see what I got to contend with? Here it is yuh mother done some of everything short of murder to get the money and now she acting like she don want it! Here she think up a plan that would make Al Capone cry shame and now she’s hanging back . . .”

  Before the silence could form he remarked casually, “All this time I waiting on you I could be halfway to New York.” His hand passed in a quick caress over her shoulder. “You might as well give me the piece of paper lemma g’long and bring back the money instead of waiting around on you . . .”

  “No,” she stammered, “no.”

  “All right.” He shrugged and went back to the window and sat down. His fingers beat a gay staccato on the ledge but his gay smile was gone. “Silla,” he called her softly, “what I did tell you Sat’day night when we did talk so long?”

  Silla tried to fend off his voice with her hand.

  “What I did tell yuh?”

  “Oh mahn, stop nuh!” she moaned.

  “I did tell you that I was one man never hold a grudge against a soul. And I did tell you something else.” He pointed at her back, his eyes narrowed. “I said what’s done is done, din I? I said maybe I wasn’t meant to have the piece of ground. I even said that what you did made sense. Din I say that?”

  When she did not answer, his shout cut the silence. “Din I say that?”

  And, helplessly, she nodded.

  “And yet yuh acting now like I gon take yuh money and run off someplace . . .”

  “I din say that . . .” she protested weakly.

  “But yuh acting that way,” he declared, half-rising, but checked himself and sprawled on the ledge again. Suddenly he took off his hat and placed it over his face, folded his arms and leaned against the window as though dozing.

 
Selina’s eyes moved in a swift wondering arc from him to the mother while under the table Ina’s leg pressed urgently against hers.

  After a time he pushed the hat from his face and he was smiling. Walking slowly over to Silla he placed his hand comfortingly on her shoulder and his voice was comforting. “Woman, I been trying to tell yuh for the last two days and nights that it’s your money. That I ain quarreling with you no more. Yuh think I still vex ’bout what yuh did?” He leaned over solicitously and she pulled away a little. “Yes, I still a little vex,” he confessed, “but what I must do, nuh? It gone. And it serve me right ’cause I’s the one marry you knowing full well yuh was a tearcat . . . The money yours!” He extended his hand graciously. “You deserve it. You sin enough for it, mahn . . . So give me the piece of paper lemma g’long and come back . . .”

  “No.” The mother shook her head as though to clear it. “Take yuh hand off me . . .”

  Deighton sprang back and fleetingly his eyes hardened, then he was smiling again and making her a low bow. “All right. All right. But think, Silla-gal.” His lips split over his teeth in a grin. “If I don want to give you this money there’s no way on this Christ earth you can get it. Consider . . . it still got to cross my hand first. Even if you come up to the bank window with me, the man still gon put the money in my hand ’cause I’s Deighton Boyce, best-proof. And I know you not gon show your colors in front those white people by trying to snatch it from me. Even if yuh did try and the police came, they would see that the money is rightfully mine. Think! Silla-gal, this is one time you got to trust me. I got the ace in the hole, mahn . . . But rest yuhself.” He slapped her shoulder jovially. “I coming back with yuh money . . .”

  They waited for all that he had said to penetrate the mother’s lethargy.

  “G’long . . .” she murmured finally, and the word seemed wrenched from her. “But . . . but make haste back here . . .” She lifted dull eyes to him—“And . . . Oh Christ if yuh was to . . .” and struggled up, threatening, then lapsed back. “Here’s the key. . .”

  All the while Deighton unlocked the green metal box and gathered the papers together he scolded, “All this time I been here talking I could of been to New York and back and on muh way to the job . . .”

  He stuffed the papers into the brown envelope and closed the box. As he read the draft, his smile faded, his jaw stiffened, but this was only a moment and he was jovial again. “I tell yuh there ain many men my color ever handle this much money at one time, I bet. I gon get a check and deposit it, Silla,” he declared, folding the draft and slipping it in his pocket. Then he carefully arranged his clothes, inspected his shoes, set his hat at a debonair angle and shouted gaily, “I gone!” swirling out of the room.

  The air settled slowly after his departure. Now that his blithe voice was gone the silence gradually became as stark-white as the kitchen. For a long time, the children and Silla sat as though he were still there—in a stunned and wondering suspension.

  When Selina returned from school that afternoon the mother was still at the table, her hands around the empty teacup and the same numb lassitude in her body. But her face had changed. It was drawn and deeply lined as though she had aged since the morning. At Selina’s footstep she raised her haggard eyes, whispering, “He told you something? He told you he wasn’t coming back?”

  “No.”

  “Oh God!” she groaned and dropped her head again over the cup. “How I could let a smile . . . ? A smile now and a few words and thing in the night . . .” She struck the table, and the teacup made a fragile exquisite sound in the saucer. She stared deeply into the cup as though she saw her folly in the cold dregs. “Judas smile! Judas words!” She shuddered and pressed her broad hands tightly around it.

  “He’ll come,” Selina said quietly, feeling a twinge of pity for her.

  She shook her head. “To let a Judas smile win out . . . To let the man walk out this house with the draft big in his hand and the false smile on his lips and know deep within muh it was wrong and still let he go . . . Oh God, a few words in the night . . . I din know I could still get so foolish. . .”

  “He went straight to work since it was late,” Selina said impatiently. For how could it be otherwise? What the mother was saying was impossible. Selina’s mind refused to admit it. How could he not come back when he knew how she loved him? “Yes, that’s what he did,” she confirmed loudly. “He took the check to work since it was late.”

  The mother’s dead eyes lifted almost trustingly to hers. For a moment she wanted to be convinced, but the moment passed quickly and doubt scored her face again and her head sank over the cup. She uttered in loud self-condemnation, “I deserve to spend the rest of muh days in sackcloth and ashes—to walk with B.F. mark ’pon muh forehead, Big Fool . . .”

  Suddenly she sprang up from the table and the tea things hailed her rising with a tinkling, late-afternoon sound. The wrath was tight in her face and she struck past Selina and began pacing the dining room and hall. Selina watched her form blur into the hall’s gloom and then take shape in the dining room—like Proteus rising and returning to a black sea.

  Ina came. They heard her oxfords scraping on the slate walk between the stoop and the blown garden and her cautious step in the vestibule. The mother paused, her head raised, her rage leashed for a moment. As Ina came down the hall, she darted out of the shadows. “He told you somethin’?” she cried.

  Ina echoed her cry and hugged her books. “Isn’t he back yet?” she whispered, apprehension shading her eyes.

  “He told you he wasn’t coming back?”

  “No . . .” she whispered.

  Silla waved her aside. “But what he does tell you anyway,” and began pacing again.

  Ina hurried to Selina in the kitchen doorway. “Didn’t he come yet?”

  “No.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Oh no, what? He had to go right to work instead of coming home, that’s all.”

  Relief flushed Ina’s face. “Yes, that’s what he did,” she said eagerly. “Remember he kept saying he was gonna be late for work? Yes, that what’s happened . . .” But even as she spoke, doubt crept under the words. She broke off and sat at their table in the corner. Nervously she straightened her socks, crossed her slim legs and ran her hand over her neat hair. Under her dress her slight but shapely body looked as if it would always excite passion without returning it, and she touched it now in her nervousness, the small firm breasts, the slim thighs, and all the while her eyes darted longingly toward the door. But she remained. She sensed perhaps that not even the parlor and the piano would offer her a sanctuary this time.

  She sat, Selina stood calm in her certainty, and the mother prowled the hall, while outside the March wind blew the sun to the west and brought the early winter dusk surging up in the east. Inside the kitchen the motor on top of the second-hand refrigerator turned over noisily; the door upstairs opened and Maritze’s pale footsteps glided up the stairs. Finally all sound dropped away. Even the mother stopped pacing and stood silent and waiting against the wall.

  They heard him at the end of another hour. The keys first, and the homey jangle they made as he searched for the right one, then, the rusty protest of the basement gate. They felt the cold blade of wind through the hall.

  Then his voice burst in the dark hall—like a light suddenly beamed across a night sky—gay, teasing, ebullient, shouting, “Where’s everybody? Where’s muh lady-folks? Come, Selina! Come, Ina!” Then the sound of things tumbling and he was gone, to return calling in the same irrepressible gaiety, “Light, light, let there be light, it say in the good book . . .” and he switched on the seldom-used ceiling light, and the rich oak wainscoting, the gilt framed mirror and the red carpet leaped into festive brilliance.

  Deighton stood in the arena of light, dapper, resplendent, a new coat draped sportively over his shoulder and the light gray hat at a rakish angle. He might have been posing for a photograph with his wide smile and fixed stance, with the boxes i
n his arms and piled around his feet—boxes wrapped in gay paper and promising rich, frivolous things.

  His eyes roved teasingly to the mother, who stood strangely paralyzed against the wall. “Silla-gal, is that you? What you doing home from work? If yuh know like me, yuh best not lose a day . . .” With that he scooped up more boxes and yelled, his voice muffled by them, “It Christmas, Christmas in the middle of March. I coming through. Out muh way! I coming through!”

  He winked over the boxes at the mother as he passed, making a suggestive motion with his palm as though to slap her on the thigh. “Silla-gal, how’s tricks? Where muh lady-folks?”

  When he saw them he shouted and the boxes tumbled. “Lady-folks, how? There’s somethin’ fuh everybody today . . . somethin’ fuh ev . . . very . . . body,” he chanted like a barker, and pranced back past Silla, who stood with the anger trapped and useless inside her.

  He returned with more boxes and swooped down on the table, piled the breakfast things in his arms and swept them in a blithe, dangerous whirl to the sink. He whipped off the tablecloth and held it low in front of him, jerking it and stamping his foot. “Wunna know what this is?” he asked gleefully. “A bullfight, nuh! I did see that thing in Cuba once and it near made me puke . . .” He flung aside the cloth and, smiling again, stacked the boxes on the table. As he arranged them in a pyramid he talked headlong, laughing constantly, his hands gesturing. “I had a time today, lady-folks . . . Ha, ha, a time! Lemma tell yuh . . . I went in these fancy stores over here on Fifth Avenuh and din know a thing . . . I din know what size I wanted and I din know what colors wunna would like . . . But I tell yuh what I did and it work . . .

  “Lady-folks, money does talk sweet enough in this man country . . . Ha! When I went in these store the first thing I did was to lift muh head and not act like I come asking for a job sweeping the floor or cleaning out their toilet . . . I come in looking like I was somebody big . . . They look at me funny at first . . . But all I did was to start counting muh money . . . and I tell yuh they almost break their neck running to wait ’pon muh . . . Ha! Ha! I was never call so much of ‘Sir’ in all muh born days . . .”