by Ann Petry
‘Would you like to sort of go through the inside of the house before I show you your room?’ Mrs. Chandler asked.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Lutie said quietly. And wondered how she had been able to say ‘yes, ma’am’ so neatly and so patly. Some part of her mind must have had it already, must have already mapped out the way she was to go about keeping this job for as long as was necessary by being the perfect maid. Patient and good-tempered and hard-working and more than usually bright.
Later she was to learn that Mrs. Chandler’s mother and father regarded this house as being very small. ‘The children’s house.’ The very way they said it told her they were used to enormous places ten times the size of this and that they thought this doll-house affair cute and just right for children for a few years. Mr. Chandler’s father never commented on it one way or the other. So it was impossible for Lutie to tell what he thought about it when he came to stay for an occasional week-end.
But to Lutie the house was a miracle, what with the four big bedrooms, each one with its own bath; the nursery that was as big as the bedrooms, and under the nursery a room and bath that belonged to her. On top of that there was a living room, a dining room, a library, a laundry. Taken all together it was like something in the movies, what with the size of the rooms and the big windows that brought the river and the surrounding woods almost into the house. She had never seen anything like it before.
That first day when she walked into Mrs. Chandler’s bedroom her breath had come out in an involuntary ‘Oh!’
‘You like it?’ Mrs. Chandler asked, smiling.
Lutie nodded and then remembered and said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She looked at the room, thinking there wasn’t any way she could say what this bedroom looked like to her when all her life she had slept on couches in living rooms, in cubicles that were little more than entrances to and exits from other rooms that were rented out to roomers; when the first real bedroom she ever had was that small one in Jamaica, where if you weren’t careful you would bump your head on the low-hanging ceiling, for the dormer window only raised the ceiling right where the window was.
No, she decided, there wasn’t any way to explain what this room looked like to her. It ran across one whole end of the house so that windows looked out on the river, out on the gardens in front, out on the woods at the side. It was covered from wall to wall with thick red carpet and right near the fourposter bed was a round white rug—a rug with pile so deep it looked like fur. Muted chintz draperies gleamed softly at the windows, formed the petticoat on the bed, covered the chaise longue in front of the windows that faced the river and the pair of chairs drawn up near the fireplace.
The rest of the house was just as perfect as Mrs. Chandler’s bedroom. Even her room—the maid’s room with its maple furniture and vivid draperies—that, too, was perfect. Little Henry Chandler, who was two years older than Bub, was also perfect—that is, he wasn’t spoiled or anything. Just a nice, happy kid, liking her at once, always wanting to be with her. The Chandlers called him Little Henry because his father’s name was Henry. She thought it funny at first, because colored people always called their children ‘Junior’ or ‘Sonnie’ when the kid’s name was the same as his father’s. But she had to admit that calling a kid Little Henry gave him a certain dignity and a status all his own, while it prevented confusion, for there was no mistaking whom you were talking about.
Yes. The whole thing was perfect. Mr. Chandler was young and attractive and obviously made plenty of money. Yet after six months of living there she was uneasily conscious that there was something wrong. She wasn’t too sure that Mrs. Chandler was overfond of Little Henry; she never held him on her lap or picked him up and cuddled him the way mothers do their children. She was always pushing him away from her.
Mr. Chandler drank too much. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but having lived with Pop who had an unquenchable thirst it was easy for her to recognize all the signs of a hard drinker. Mr. Chandler’s hands were shaking when he came down for breakfast and he had to have a pick-up before he could even face a cup of coffee. When he came in the house at night, the first thing he did was to get himself a good-sized drink. It was almost impossible for her to keep full bottles in the liquor cabinet, their contents disappeared in no time at all.
‘Guess Lutie forgot to put a new supply in the bar,’ Mr. Chandler would say when she came in in answer to his ring.
‘Yes, sir,’ she would say quietly and go to get more bottles.
The funny thing about it was that Mrs. Chandler never noticed. After a while Lutie discovered that Mrs. Chandler never noticed anything about Mr. Chandler anyway. Yet she was awfully nice; she was always laughing; she had a great many young friends who dressed just like she did—some of them even had small children about the age of Little Henry.
But she didn’t like Mrs. Chandler’s friends much. They came to the house to luncheon parties or to bridge parties in the afternoon. Either they ate like horses or they didn’t eat at all, because they were afraid they would get too fat. And she never could decide which irritated her the most, to see them gulp down the beautiful food she had fixed, eating it so fast they really didn’t taste it, or to see them toy with it, pushing it around on their plates.
Whenever she entered a room where they were, they stared at her with a queer, speculative look. Sometimes she caught snatches of their conversation about her. ‘Sure, she’s a wonderful cook. But I wouldn’t have any good-looking colored wench in my house. Not with John. You know they’re always making passes at men. Especially white men.’ And then, ‘Now I wonder—’
After that she continued to wait on them quietly, efficiently, but she wouldn’t look at them—she looked all around them. It didn’t make her angry at first. Just contemptuous. They didn’t know she had a big handsome husband of her own; that she didn’t want any of their thin unhappy husbands. But she wondered why they all had the idea that colored girls were whores.
It was, she discovered slowly, a very strange world that she had entered. With an entirely different set of values. It made her feel that she was looking through a hole in a wall at some enchanted garden. She could see, she could hear, she spoke the language of the people in the garden, but she couldn’t get past the wall. The figures on the other side of it loomed up life-size and they could see her, but there was this wall in between which prevented them from mingling on an equal footing. The people on the other side of the wall knew less about her than she knew about them.
She decided it wasn’t just because she was a maid; it was because she was colored. No one assumed that the young girl from the village who came in to help when they had big dinner parties would eagerly welcome any advances made toward her by the male guests. Even the man who mowed the lawn and washed the windows and weeded the garden didn’t move behind a wall that effectively and automatically placed him in some previously prepared classification. One day when he was going to New Haven, Mrs. Chandler drove him to the railroad station in Saybrook, and when he got out of the car Lutie saw her shake hands with him just as though he had been an old friend or one of her departing week-end guests.
When she was in high school she had believed that white people wanted their children to be president of the United States; that most of them worked hard with that goal in mind. And if not president—well, perhaps a cabinet member. Even the Pizzinis’ daughter had got to be a school-teacher, showing that they, too, had wanted more learning and knowledge in the family.
But these people were different. Apparently a college education was all right, and seemed to have become a necessity even in the business world they talked about all the time. But not important. Mr. Chandler and his friends had gone through Yale and Harvard and Princeton, casually, matter-of-factly, and because they had to. But once these men went into business they didn’t read anything but trade magazines and newspapers.
She had watched Mr. Chandler reading the morning newspaper while he ate his breakfast. He riffled through the front pages wher
e the news was, and then almost immediately turned to the financial section. He spent quite a while reading that, and then, if he had time, he would look at the sports pages. And he was through. She could tell by looking at him that the effort of reading had left him a little tired just like Pop or Mrs. Pizzini. Mr. Chandler’s father did the same thing. So did the young men who came up from New York to spend the week-end.
No. They didn’t want their children to be president or diplomats or anything like that. What they wanted was to be rich—‘filthy’ rich, as Mr. Chandler called it.
When she brought the coffee into the living room after dinner, the conversation was always the same.
‘Richest damn country in the world—’
‘Always be new markets. If not here in South America, Africa, India—Everywhere and anywhere—’
‘Hell! Make it while you’re young. Anyone can do it—’
‘Outsmart the next guy. Think up something before anyone else does. Retire at forty—’
It was a world of strange values where the price of something called Tell and Tell and American Nickel and United States Steel had a direct effect on emotions. When the price went up everybody’s spirits soared; if it went down they were plunged in gloom.
After a year of listening to their talk, she absorbed some of the same spirit. The belief that anybody could be rich if he wanted to and worked hard enough and figured it out carefully enough. Apparently that’s what the Pizzinis had done. She and Jim could do the same thing, and she thought she saw what had been wrong with them before—they hadn’t tried hard enough, worked long enough, saved enough. There hadn’t been any one thing they wanted above and beyond everything else. These people had wanted only one thing—more and more money—and so they got it. Some of this new philosophy crept into her letters to Jim.
When she first went to work for the Chandlers, Mrs. Chandler had suggested that, instead of her taking one day off a week, it would be a good idea if she took four days off right together all at once at the end of a month; pointing out that that way Lutie could go home to Jamaica and not have to turn right around and come back. As Lutie listened to the conversations in the Chandlers’ house, she came more and more under the influence of their philosophy. As a result she began going home only once in two months, pointing out to Jim how she could save the money she would have spent for train fare.
She soon discovered that the Chandlers didn’t spend very much time at home in spite of their big perfect house. They always went out in the evening unless they had guests of their own. After she had been there a year and a half, she discovered, too, that Mrs. Chandler paid a lot more attention to other women’s husbands than she did to her own. After a dinner party, Mrs. Chandler would walk through the garden with someone else’s husband, showing him the river view, talking to him with an animation she never showed when talking to Mr. Chandler. And, Lutie observed from the kitchen window, leaning much too close to him.
Once, when Lutie went into the living room, Mrs. Chandler was sitting on the window-seat with one of the dinner guests and his arms were tight around her and he was kissing her. Mr. Chandler came right in behind Lutie, so that he saw the same thing. The expression on his face didn’t change—only his lips went into a straight thin line.
Two weeks before Christmas, Mrs. Chandler’s mother came for a visit. A tall, thin woman with cold gray eyes and hair almost exactly the same color as her eyes. She took one look at Lutie and hardly let her get out of the door before she was leaning across the dining-room table to say in a clipped voice that carried right out into the kitchen: ‘Now I wonder if you’re being wise, dear. That girl is unusually attractive and men are weak. Besides, she’s colored and you know how they are—’
Lutie moved away from the swinging door to stand way over by the stove so she couldn’t hear the rest of it. Queer how that was always cropping up. Here she was highly respectable, married, mother of a small boy, and, in spite of all that, knowing all that, these people took one look at her and immediately got that now-I-wonder look. Apparently it was an automatic reaction of white people—if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it stood to reason she had to be a prostitute. If not that—at least sleeping with her would be just a simple matter, for all one had to do was make the request. In fact, white men wouldn’t even have to do the asking because the girl would ask them on sight.
She grew angrier as she thought about it. Of course, none of them could know about your grandmother who had brought you up, she said to herself. And ever since you were big enough to remember the things that people said to you, had said over and over, just like a clock ticking, ‘Lutie, baby, don’t you never let no white man put his hands on you. They ain’t never willin’ to let a black woman alone. Seems like they all got a itch and a urge to sleep with ’em. Don’t you never let any of ’em touch you.’
Something that was said so often and with such gravity it had become a part of you, just like breathing, and you would have preferred crawling in bed with a rattlesnake to getting in bed with a white man. Mrs. Chandler’s friends and her mother couldn’t possibly know that, couldn’t possibly imagine that you might have a distrust and a dislike of white men far deeper than the distrust these white women had of you. Or know that, after hearing their estimation of you, nothing in the world could ever force you to be even friendly with a white man.
And again she thought of the barrier between her and these people. The funny part of it was she was willing to trust them and their motives without questioning, but the instant they saw the color of her skin they knew what she must be like; they were so confident about what she must be like they didn’t need to know her personally in order to verify their estimate.
The night before Christmas Mr. Chandler’s brother arrived—a tall, sardonic-looking man. His name was Jonathan, and Mrs. Chandler smiled at him with a warmth Lutie had never seen on her face before. Mr. Chandler didn’t have much to say to him and Mrs. Chandler’s mother pointedly ignored him.
Lutie heard them arguing in the living room long after she had gone to bed. An argument that grew more and more violent, with Mrs. Chandler screaming and Mr. Chandler shouting and Mrs. Chandler’s mother bellowing any time the other voices stopped. She drifted off to sleep, thinking that it was nice to know white people had loud common fights just like colored people.
Right after breakfast, everybody went into the living room to see the Christmas tree and open their presents. Lutie went along, too, with Little Henry by the hand. It was a big tree, and even though Lutie had helped Mrs. Chandler’s mother decorate it the day before, she couldn’t get over how it looked standing there in front of the river windows, going up and up, all covered with tinsel and stars and brilliantly colored baubles.
Everybody got down on the floor near the tree to sort out and open the presents. Lutie happened to look up because Jonathan Chandler had moved away from the tree, and she wondered if he was looking for an ash tray because there was one right on the small table near the tree and he didn’t need to go all the way across the room to find one. So she saw him reach into the drawer in the secretary. Reach in and get Mr. Chandler’s revolver and stand there a moment fingering it. He walked back toward the tree, and she couldn’t figure out whether he had put the gun back or not. Because he had closed the drawer quickly. She couldn’t see his hand because he had it held a little in back of him.
Mrs. Chandler was holding out a package to Lutie and she looked at her to see why she didn’t take it and then followed the direction of Lutie’s eyes. So that she, too, became aware that Jonathan Chandler was walking right toward the Christmas tree and saw him stop just a little way away from it.
Lutie knew suddenly what he was going to do and she started to get up from the floor to try and stop him. But she was too late. He drew the gun out quickly and fired it. Held it under his ear and pulled the trigger.
After that there was so much confusion that Lutie only remembered a few things here and there. Mrs. Chandler started screaming
and went on and on and on until Mr. Chandler said roughly, ‘Shut up, God damn you!’
She stopped then. But it was worse after she stopped because she just sat there on the floor staring into space.
Mrs. Chandler’s mother kept saying: ‘The nerve of him. The nerve of him. Deliberately embarrassing us. And on Christmas morning, too.’
Mr. Chandler poured drink after drink of straight whiskey and then, impatiently shoving the small glass aside, raised the bottle to his lips letting its contents literally run down his throat. Lutie watched him, wondering why none of them said a word about it’s being a shame; thinking they acted worse and sounded worse than any people she had ever seen before.
Then she forgot about them, for she happened to look down at Little Henry crouching on the floor, his small face so white, so frightened, that she very nearly cried. None of them had given him a thought; they had deserted him as neatly as though they had deposited him on the doorstep of a foundling hospital. She picked him up and held him close to her, letting him get the feel of her arms around him; telling him through her arms that his world had not suddenly collapsed about him, that the strong arms holding him so close were a solid, safe place where he belonged, where he was safe. She made small, comforting noises under her breath until some of the whiteness left his face. Then she carried him out into the kitchen and held him on her lap and rocked him back and forth in her arms until the fright went out of his eyes.
After Mr. Chandler’s brother killed himself in the living room, she didn’t lose her belief in the desirability of having money, though she saw that mere possession of it wouldn’t necessarily guarantee happiness. What was more important, she learned that when one had money there were certain unpleasant things one could avoid—even things like a suicide in the family.
