Suddenly, with his fingers lingering reassuringly on her arm, Selina wanted to leave. To rush out and lock them in that forbidding Victorian room. To find some quiet place out of reach of their voices and there read until she forgot them. She didn’t care what they did! And the biscuit she was holding dropped with a soft thud. The mother could hold the knife and he could run on it and die and she didn’t care. But then, in the tense wait, he sighed like a girl and she loved him, and the mother lifted her fine dark eyes to him again and she both loved and hated her...
“All that studying!” Silla’s arms rose and fell tragically. “And your heart in none of it. You din really learn that course in radio repairing. You was glad enough when you din get the job in accounting. You din really want to play no trumpet. Always half-studying something. It’s like”—she searched for the thought—“like you knew before you began that you wasn’t really smart enough to learn it good—or like you did say deep to yourself that you din want to make good at anything. A show! All of it nothing but . . .”
He motioned her to stop. It was a selfless gesture which said that he did not wish to spare himself, but only to spare her the pain of saying it and the anguish streaking her face like tears. “Silla . . . Silla,” he murmured. Closing his eyes he called her within the dim confusion of his mind. Perhaps, for him, she was nothing more than his own inner voice, publishing at last the long catalog of his failures . . .
“What you got now for the over nine hundred odd dollars cash throw ’way?” She thrust her chin toward him for an answer and he simply shook his head. “What it mean now—all those fancy silk undershirt? Where’s your jokes and the change jingling in your pocket to make like a big sports in front the children? And above all”—her voice dropped but her bitter gaze held his—“where’s the concubine you had all these years whose sweet sickening smell you brought home every Sunday morning?”
“I know. Silla, I tell you I know. Stop, nuh!” And again his concern was for her, not himself.
She could not stop. The wall she had built against the thoughts during their long silence had cracked, the words streaming through, and she was powerless to stop them. Then, too, she did not want to stop. For his humility galled her. His quick assent to all she said goaded her on. Why didn’t he leap up and shout her down, or lean across the table and smash the words from her mouth? But no, instead he exulted in the pain each word brought and repaid her abuse with compassion. It was his wish to suffer that suddenly spurred in her the need to make that suffering full. She rose, her eyes groping through the shadows to the family photograph. Gazing at it, she said with dread emphasis, “Then years back, it was the car. The piece of old car you had to have even though it was depression, just to make like a big sports in front the boy. That piece of old junk that made his heart worse and killed him before his time.”
Finally he responded, leaping up and leaning across the table, his dark taut face quivering. His whisper held the dark and arid joy of relief. “Silla, is that what you did always think? All this time?”
Her head snapped his way but her eyes were crowded with another face. “Yes, all this time. I can still see that wreck of a car going birdspeed down the road, lurching like somebody drunk and the boy lurching in it and laughing.”
And slowly Deighton also saw that scene rise in the room’s shadows and it absorbed him entirely. For moments there was no sign of his breathing even. Selina and Ina were crouched fearfully in their seats, their eyes closed and their heads bowed. Gradually Silla grew uneasy at his stillness. Regret tinged her eyes and her hands made to pull the accusation from the air. Then he smiled. This one, sad and apologetic, told her that he understood all now, that he knew how that memory must have underscored each harsh word and prompted every unkind act. How, at night, it must have sometimes caused her body to turn cold under his. It was a smile of gratitude. For she had unwittingly probed deep into that shadowy turn of his mind and found the doubt hidden there. She was the one who had driven it out, unmasked it and shaped it into words. Now there would be no need to question that uneasy guilt. He could embrace it.
“Who . . . what . . . put you so?”
He almost laughed at the innocence of Silla’s question. In answer his hand traced some airy abstract figure above his plate and then dropped to The New Light. He stared at the bold headline: FATHER IS THE ONLY FATHER, and as he read, the dark balm settled once again over his mind; his eyes misted over with peace; his body began to sag with it. He was safe. That was when he said in a vague monotone, “I going, Silla. Father asked me to work and live in the kingdom here in Brooklyn. I was gon say no, but I going now. It’s for the best,” he said gently, gazing around at them. “I going. Thank you, Father.”
Silla’s protest was only a faint incredulous cry, and her hands had to convey in jerky scattered motions the upheaval inside her. Only Selina’s scream, splitting the already troubled air, spoke for her and the stunned Ina. She whirled to her father, ready to win him with her tears and if this failed to strike him until he roused and denied what he had said. But she shrank back, terrified suddenly at that empty but determined face, not recognizing his blind eyes. Her loud lament filled the room.
“Selina, what it tis? What he saying?” Silla called. “Ina, tell me, nuh!” But neither could answer. “What it tis you saying?” she begged Deighton.
“I going, Silla.”
But his answer was not enough, and she swung away, seeking in desperation her invisible listener. “What he saying?”
This time she must have received the full answer, for slowly, as though she were being bled, the dark strength drained from her face and it became flaccid and gray with defeat. The inner stay that gave her body its bold lift snapped and she slumped in her chair. “Is that what he want? To leave?” she whispered wonderingly, shaking her head in disbelief. Then she suddenly cried, “Then let him. Let him!” But her loud assent was thin and false on the air. Quickly her lips sought to retract it, but she was committed. When she realized this, she plunged ahead, shouting to convince herself, “Yes . . . yes, let him g’long. Watch, he’ll be back here before the cat lick it ear. Let him go. And I gon see that he go today-self. But he’ll provide for these two or . . .”
“Father will provide,” he said calmly.
She was too bruised inside, too spent for anger, and she said dully, “Father provide? What? Peace? I can take peace to the store? I can fill their stomachs with it?” Her shattered eyes sought Selina across the plates of uneaten biscuits and cold eggs, and she murmured with sad vindication, “Look, look how you did waste love! Now go out someplace. Both of you. I don’t want no more tears ’bout here today!”
Silently Selina filed out behind Ina and accompanied her to church, but she did not stay there long, for she did not know how, nor did she want, to pray. Besides, the nave was cold. The same numbing cold that circled her heart. She left Ina praying with a passion she had never suspected in her and wandered, blind, through the streets, past the despoiled brownstones that had been converted into rooming houses, glancing at the roomers who stared like prisoners from the windows of their cubicles while their children chalked their names on the stoops. When dusk fell she watched a group of them at their last game of potsie under a street lamp, and their lusty shouts seemed to usurp the air . . .
When she finally returned home, exhausted from her wandering, she knew from the unnatural stillness that he was gone. Even though, when she looked, his shoes were still in the closet and his silk underwear piled neatly in the dresser.
X
She went to see him every Saturday at the peace restaurant on Fulton Street which he managed and where he lived. Usually she went alone for Ina always made some pained excuse, alone up Fulton Street, where every bedizened store window hawked the Saturday sales, a Fulton Street already odorous with barbecue and port wine, where, even at noon, there was a hint of the night’s certain violence. She passed the queues of children outside the movie houses, the soldiers on leave outside the ba
rs, Percy Challenor’s real estate office and glimpsed him towering like a behemoth amid his clients.
The peace restaurant was a block from Percy Challenor’s office, just where the elevated train curved onto Fulton Street, and the trestle’s shadow lay across the restaurant’s tiled floor and marble tables, it reached to Deighton standing at the cash register, his left arm dangling and his face cavernous with peace. Each Saturday he said in the same gentle but remote voice, “Peace, how’s the lady-folks? How’s Miss Ina? And Silla?” and led her to a table out of the sun. She sat there content all afternoon watching him ring up the checks. At sunset he would come over and with his good hand touch her face. “It getting late. Make haste and get home safe.”
At home Selina invariably found the mother waiting for her under the stoop, her face disguised by shadows but her voice, and her hand grasping Selina’s arm, betraying her anxiety. “Well, what he had to say for himself this time?”
“Nothing.”
“How you mean, nothing? He ain talking nothing yet ’bout coming back or so?”
“No.” Selina would pull away her arm and leave the mother standing there in the gloom.
Once, when Selina and Ina returned from the restaurant, the mother met them with the usual question, and Ina suddenly cried, her eyes dark with tears and hopelessness. “Why do you ask the same thing all the time? Can’t you see he’s not coming back? Can’t either of you understand that after all these months? He’s happy. I looked at him good today and saw how happy he is. And I’m not going back there again, it’s no use. He doesn’t want or need us any more!”
After this the mother seldom asked for him, but her face became more drawn each time Selina returned from the restaurant, her eyes more haggard, and she began working longer hours at the plant.
During that summer, the last summer of the war, Deighton often allowed Selina to sit in his room in back. It was a small cool room which the flies had not found—chaste white and furnished with a cot, a dresser, one chair, a washbasin marred with rust and a photograph of Father Peace. It could have been a monk’s cell, a place for meditation and penance. Sometimes he came in and lay on the cot reading The New Light while she stared out the barred window at the children from the tenement upstairs playing in the back yard. Over the weeks their silent afternoons took on a certain intimacy. She often washed his socks now and spread them in the sun on the window sill to dry.
She was washing his socks the day the mother came into the restaurant—rubbing them between her fists while gazing out at the children, thinking how their piercing shouts suggested the intense sun, the tall singed weeds and the dust. Hearing the mother’s voice she thought that it was the mother of the children—some heavy harassed woman calling down through the fire escapes.
Then, suddenly, all other sound dropped away, leaving only that voice. It was as if the entire tumultuous sweep of life had stopped: the children fixed in the hurtling attitudes of their play, the traffic on Fulton Street grounded to a halt. All over the world time and motion had a stop. In that pause her own heart ceased, and she knew then that it was the mother. Clutching the wet socks in her fists she charged down the passageway, ready to drive her out. But as she burst into the restaurant she halted and her arms dropped uselessly at her side at the sight of the policeman. The authority of his white face and uniform, of his big hand on her father’s arm, choked her cry. The sight of the mother in the doorway trapped the breath in her lungs.
Silla, in a dark dress that denied the summer, her eyes aggrieved and bitter, was shouting in a voice shrill with rage, “That’s he, officer. That’s he, I say. His own don’t count since he take up with this bogus god, so let him go back where he come from! He don need nobody now but Father? He’s happy? Well, le’s see how happy he gon be back home!”
“All right, all right, lady. I’m asking the questions, not you,” the policeman called and turned again to Deighton. “C’mon, mister, is ya name Deighton Boyce?”
Deighton said nothing, but his vacant eyes reached over the policeman’s shoulder to the mother and he gave her an understanding smile. They ranged over the customers with the same gentleness. Looking over his shoulder he saw Selina and the smile became almost radiant. He sketched a vague sign that said she must not mind, that he welcomed this final humiliation, for not only had he sinned, but they also: the customers, the policeman, the mother, the waiters, all—even she—and his penance was for them also.
But Selina did not see him. In her jarred mind the room suddenly canted to one side, then spun in a wash of sunlight. As quickly it returned, sharp, in focus, and she made to answer his gesture and smile, to plead with the policeman for him. But even as she fought to speak, the restaurant wavered again and his figure dissolved. Because she said nothing, she was forgotten. Her body—less raw and shapeless now under her summer dress—fell heavily against the counter; her eyes—immense and old in her thin face—saw nothing but dark streaks in the eddying sunlight. She heard nothing more. All she knew was that the socks were cold and dripping and somehow confused in her mind with blood.
She did not see the policeman grab Deighton’s injured arm and, as he felt its limpness, drop it; nor did she hear him say, not unkindly, “I’m asking ya one more time if ya name’s Deighton Boyce, mister. This woman’s sworn out a warrant for your arrest and deportation for illegal entry into the United States. Ya hear that?”
Deighton wet his lips but said nothing.
“Look, mister, this is a serious charge. You understand? Is it you?”
“It tis,” the mother cried, her voice sagging with pity now. “That’s he. That’s his name. His head turn, officer, and he don even know himself anymore . . .”
The policeman shook him roughly and this time something touched Deighton’s face. He suddenly became curious. His eyes flitted wonderingly over the customers, asking, it seemed, how they had managed life, envying them their work-scarred hands and dull faces. He studied the policeman’s face and in his shattered mind it became the white faces in the stores of Bridgetown long ago. Those faces, stippled red by the tropic sun, that had always refused his request for a clerk’s job and thus turned the years at school, and his attempts to be like them in his dark wool English-cut suits (even in that sodden heat!), and his face—clean though black—into nothing; that had utterly unmanned him before he was yet a man; that had stripped him of any possibility of self and then hustled him out . . . Suddenly he laid his hand in resignation on the policeman’s shoulder and said, “Yes, officer, they did call me Deighton Boyce.”
“Okay, let’s go.” Quickly the officer guided him through the maze of tables to the door. There Deighton paused and gently freed his arm and went up to Silla. The cast lifted from his eyes and at the same moment Silla’s rage fell away and they searched each other’s faces.
They might have been alone with the world around them stilled and the years rubbed away like smoke from a glass. For the look they shared must have been the same as when they first met: shy yet curious and at its core the stir of love. Silently they asked each other what had gone wrong, what it was that had ruined them for each other, and their mutual bewilderment confessed they did not know.
It was only a moment. The policeman’s hand was on his arm again, the world intruding. Deighton’s eyes clouded over; he gave Silla that blind pietistic smile and glided past her, murmuring his chant of absolution, “Father will provide. Peace, it’s truly wonderful.”
As he moved away, with the shadow of the el rippling over his bowed head, Silla’s eyes followed him with enraged pity. Weeping, reaching for him, she shouted, “Let him go back where he come from if he don’t count his own. Let him go back!” Even when the Saturday crowd had engulfed him and strangers paused, puzzled, in front of the restaurant, she still cried, “Let him go back where he come from!” and a passing train lent the words a thunderous emphasis.
“Hitler,” Selina murmured and drew the sheet up to her chin. A car sped by and fleetingly threw its yellow light into
the dark bedroom and across her rigid face.
“Hitler.”
Ina stirred beside her and whispered, “What’re you saying?”
“Hitler.”
“Hitler? Who’re you calling Hitler?”
“Hitler.”
“Selina, who’re you calling that? You’re calling mother that?” and the bedsprings strained loud as she sprang up.
“Hitler.”
“She’s gonna hear you!” Ina warned, her eyes luminous with dread in the light of another passing car. “She’s still sitting out there in the dining room. Why start something else now? Just leave bad enough alone. There’s nothing we can do . . .”
“Hitler.”
“Look, he’ll be better off home. Believe me! We’ll go see him. When I start working next year I’ll save the passage money for both of us and we’ll go see him. Please,” she pleaded, shaking Selina. “Please don’t start anything this hour of the night. Just leave things alone.”
“Hitler,” Selina suddenly shouted and sat up.
Ina shrank from the cold implacable venom in Selina’s face. In the jarred silence Ina seemed to retreat from the bed, from the room. “What is it with you two?” she cried. “Why’re you always at each other’s throats? You’re alike, you know that! The same.”
“Hitler.”
“Oh stop!” She collapsed, murmuring brokenly, “Stop, she’s gonna hear you . . .”
“Hitler.”
The name struck with the regularity of a metronome in the dark room, until finally Silla softly opened the door and switched on the light. For a long time she stood blinking curiously at the faded wallpaper and prints, Ina’s cosmetics on the vanity and the furniture as if they, not Selina, were hurling the name at her. “Who you calling Hitler, Selina?” she whispered finally, a profound hurt darkening her already numbed eyes.
Brown Girl, Brownstones Page 18
