by Ann Petry
‘You’re pretty,’ he said, pressing his face close to hers. ‘Supe says you’re pretty. And he’s right.’
She kissed his forehead, thinking what’s the Super saying things like that to Bub for? And she was conscious of a stabbing fear that made her tighten her arm around Bub’s shoulder. ‘Let’s eat,’ she said.
All through the meal she kept thinking about the Super. He was so tall and so silent he was like some figure of doom. She rarely went in or out of the building that she didn’t meet him in the hallways or just coming out of his apartment, and she wondered if he watched for her. She had noticed that the other tenants rarely talked to him, merely nodding when they saw him.
He usually had his dog with him when he stood outside on the street leaning against the building. The dog would open his mouth, fairly quivering with the urge to run down the street. She imagined that if he ever satisfied the urge to run, he would plunge madly through the block biting people as he went. He would look up at the Super with something half-adoring, half-fearful in his expression, drawing a little away from him, edging along slowly a half-inch at a time, wanting to run. Then the Super would say, ‘Buddy!’ and the dog would come back to lie down close beside the man.
She couldn’t decide which was worse: the half-starved, cringing dog, the gaunt man or the shapeless whispering woman who lived with him. Mrs. Hedges, who knew everything that went on in this house and most of the other houses on the street, had informed her confidentially that the Super’s wife wasn’t really his wife, that she just stayed there with him. ‘They comes and they goes,’ Mrs. Hedges had added softly, her hard black eyes full of malice.
Bub took a big swallow of milk and choked on it. ‘Sorry,’ he murmured.
Lutie smiled at him and said, ‘Don’t drink it so fast.’ And her thoughts returned to the Super. She had to figure out some way of keeping Bub away from him. There were those long hours from the time Bub got out of school until she came home from work. She couldn’t get over Bub’s saying so innocently, ‘Supe thinks you’re pretty.’ It wouldn’t do to tell Bub point-blank not to have anything to do with him. For after that business with the shoeshine box, he would begin to believe there wasn’t much of anything he could do after school that would meet with her approval. But she would figure out something.
Again she thought that every time she turned around there was a new problem to be solved. There ought to be someone she could talk to, someone she could ask for advice. During those years she had worked in the laundry and gone to school at night, she had lost track of all her friends. And Pop didn’t believe in discussing problems—‘Just goin’ out of your way to look for trouble,’ was his answer to anything that looked like a serious question. Granny could have told her what to do if she had lived. She had never forgotten some of the things Granny had told her and the things she had told Pop. Mostly she had been right. She used to sit in her rocking chair. Wrinkled. Wise. Rocking back and forth, talking in the rhythm of the rocker. Granny had even foreseen men like this Super. She had told Pop, ‘Let her get married, Grant. Lookin’ like she do men goin’ to chase her till they catches up. Better she get married.’
And she had. At seventeen when she finished high school. Only the marriage had busted up, cracking wide open like a cheap record. Come to think about it, an awful lot of colored marriages ended like that.
Mrs. Hedges had implied the same thing shortly after they moved in. Lutie was coming home from work, and Mrs. Hedges having greeted her cordially from the window said, ‘You married, dearie?’
Her spine had stiffened until it felt rigid. Did the woman think that Bub was some nameless bastard she had obtained in a dark hallway? ‘We’re separated,’ she said sharply.
Mrs. Hedges nodded. ‘Thought so. Most of the ladies on the street is separated.’
Some day she would ask Mrs. Hedges why most of the ladies on this street were separated from their husbands. Certainly Mrs. Hedges should be able to explain it, because she knew this block between Eighth Avenue and Seventh Avenue better than most people know their own homes, and she should be able to tell her whether the women were separated before they came there to live or whether it was something that the street had done to them. If what Mrs. Hedges said was true, then this street was full of broken homes, and she thought the men must have been like Jim—unable to stand the day after day of drab living with nothing to look forward to but just enough to eat and a shelter overhead. And the women working as she had worked and the men getting fed up and getting other women.
She made an impatient movement and pushed her plate away from her. Bub was playing with a piece of meat ball, using his fork to slide it from one side of his plate to another, then arranging a neat circle of peas around it.
‘How about you going to a movie?’ she asked.
‘Tonight?’ he said, and when she nodded his face lit up. Then he frowned. ‘Can we afford it?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Hurry up and finish eating.’ The peas and the hamburger disappeared from his plate like magic. He was still chewing when he got up from the table to help count out the money for his ticket.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You can’t get in alone at night—’
‘Sure I can. All I have to do is go up to some old lady and ask her to let me go along in with her. I’ll show her my money, so she’ll know I can pay my own way. It always works,’ he said confidently.
Then he was gone, slamming the door behind him, running swiftly down the stairs. She could hear his footsteps going down the stairs. She turned the radio on in the living room and stood listening to the dance music that filled the room, thinking that she would like to go somewhere where there was music like that and dancing and young people laughing.
In the kitchen she sighed deeply before she began washing the dishes. Bub shouldn’t be going to the movies alone at night. How had he known how to get in despite the fact kids weren’t allowed in the movies alone at night? Probably learned it from the kids in the street or at school. It wasn’t right, though. She should have told him to go Saturday morning or in the afternoon after school.
There must be something he could do after school, some place he could go where he would have some fun and be safe, too. Leaning out of a kitchen window to play some kind of game with those dogs down there in the rubbish wasn’t exactly wholesome play for an eight-year-old boy. She would have to move into a street where there wasn’t a playground or a park for blocks around! He had been so happy about going to the movies. A simple little thing like that and he got all excited. She hoped he knew it was a peace offering for having lost her temper and slapped him out there in the street.
She found she was rattling the dishes noisily to cover up the quiet in the apartment. The radio was on full blast, but under it there was a stillness that crept through all the rooms. It’s these ratty little rooms, she thought. Yet she found she kept looking over her shoulder, half-expecting to find someone had stolen up in back of her under cover of the quiet.
Yes, she thought. The trouble is that these rooms are so small. After she had been in them just a few minutes, the walls seemed to come in toward her, to push against her. Now that she had this apartment, perhaps the next thing she ought to do was to find another one with bigger rooms. But she couldn’t pay any more rent than she was paying now and moving to another street would simply mean getting a new address, for the narrow dark rooms would be the same. Everything would be the same—the toilets that didn’t work efficiently, the hallways dank with the smell of urine, the small inadequate windows. No matter where she moved, if twenty-nine dollars was all the rent she could pay, why, she would simply be changing her address, for the place she moved into would be exactly like the one she moved out of.
She hung the dishtowels on the rack over the sink, straightening them so that the edges were even and stood looking at them without really seeing them. There wasn’t any point in getting a more expensive apartment, for the rent on this one was all she could manage. She wondered if lan
dlords knew what it was like to be haunted by the fear of not being able to pay the rent. After a while the word ‘rent’ grew so big it loomed up in all your thinking.
Some people took so much a week out of their pay envelopes and stuck it in books or tucked it in kitchen cupboards in cups or teapots or sugar bowls, so that by the end of the month it would be there in a lump sum all ready to hand over to the agent or the super or whoever collected. But someone would get a toothache or lose a job or a roomer wouldn’t pay, and at the end of the month the rent money would come up short. So the landlord took to asking for it every two weeks, sometimes every week if he was especially doubtful about his tenants.
As she remembered, Pop preferred to pay weekly, for on Saturday nights he did a brisk business selling the bootleg liquor that he manufactured, so that on Sunday morning he had the week’s rent money ready to turn over to the agent.
From the time her mother died when she was seven until she turned seventeen and married Jim, Saturday nights were always the same. Shortly after she got in bed there would be a furtive knock at the door. Pop would pad up the hall and hold a whispered conversation at the door. Then he would go back down the hall and a few minutes later return to the door. There would be the clink of silver and the door would close quietly. Granny would snort so loud you could hear her all through the apartment because she knew Pop had sold another bottle and she didn’t approve of it, even though each knock meant they were that much closer to having the rent money ready.
Pop would further aggravate Granny by announcing loudly as he clinked the silver in his pocket, ‘That’s all right. It’s guaranteed to put hair on a dog’s back and new life in an old man.’
Sometimes Pop would try to get a regular steady job and would return home after a few hours to spend the rest of the day, saying wrathfully, ‘White folks just ain’t no damn good.’ Then he would start mixing a new batch of his buckjuice as he called it, muttering, ‘Can’t get no job. White folks got ’em all.’
Granny would look at him coldly and her lips would curl back as she rocked and frowned, saying, ‘Men like him don’t get nowhere, Lutie. Think folks owe ’em a livin’. And mebbe they do, but not nowhere near the way he thinks.’
Lutie found herself wondering if Pop would have been different if he had lived in a different part of town and if he had been able to find a decent job that would have forced him to use all of his energy and latent ability. There wasn’t anything stupid about Pop. Life just seemed to have reacted on him until he turned sly and a little dishonest. Perhaps that was one way of fighting back.
Even the succession of girl friends that started shortly after her mother died could have been the result of his frustration—a way he had of proving to himself that there was one area of achievement in which he was the equal of any man—white or black. Though his public explanation of them was simply that he didn’t intend to marry again. ‘It don’t work out after the first time. And I gotta keep my freedom.’
Granny had observed the procession of buxom lady friends with unconcealed disapproval, which she expressed by folding her lips into a thin straight line and rocking faster and faster. Eventually Granny’s baleful eye would discourage even the boldest of them, but a few weeks later some other fat woman would show up to share Pop’s bed and board.
Again she was aware of the silence under the sound of the radio. And she went into the living room and sat down close to it, so that the dance music would shut out the silence. She had been so dead set on moving away from Pop and Lil, getting this apartment for herself and Bub, that she hadn’t stopped to figure out what was to happen next. Listening to the music she thought she couldn’t possibly go on living here with nothing to look forward to. As she sat there, it seemed to her that time stretched away in front of her so far that it couldn’t be measured; it couldn’t be encompassed or even visualized if it meant living in this place for years and years.
What else was there? She couldn’t hope to get a raise in pay without taking another civil service examination, for more pay depended on a higher rating, and it might be two years, ten years, even twenty years before it came through. The only other way of getting out was to find a man who had a good job and who wanted to marry her. The chances of that were pretty slim, for once they found out she didn’t have a divorce they lost interest in marriage and offered to share their apartments with her.
It would be more years than she cared to think about before she would be able to get a divorce because it was an expensive business. She would either have to move to some other state and establish residence there and on top of that have enough money to pay for the divorce, or she would have to get sufficient evidence to prove that Jim was living with some other woman and on top of that hire a lawyer. Either way it was done, it would cost two or three hundred dollars and it would take her years and years to save up that much money.
She got up from the chair, thinking, I can’t stay here in this little place for another minute. I’ll go for a walk. As she changed her clothes, she thought, This is the same thing that happened to Jim. He couldn’t stand being shut up in the little house in Jamaica just like I can’t stand being shut up in this apartment. Only I have a job that takes me out of here every day and I ought to be able to stand it better. But I can’t. It seems like life is going past me so fast that I’ll never catch up with it, and it wouldn’t matter particularly, but I can’t see anything ahead of me except these walls that push in against me.
She didn’t intend to go anywhere except for a walk, but she found herself dressing as slowly and as carefully as though she had a special date, putting on a plain black dress and fastening a gold-colored chain around her neck. She reached in her closet for her best coat, which was perfectly plain, too, except that it hung from the shoulders so that it flared loose and full in the back. It was a coat that she had made herself, saving up the money to buy the material, cutting it out on her bed in Pop’s apartment, stitching it up on Lil’s sewing machine. She only wore it when she was going somewhere special at night or when she went for a walk with Bub on Sunday afternoons.
Tonight wasn’t anything special. When she put the coat on, it was with the thought that wearing it would give her the feeling that she was on her way to a place where she could forget for a little while about the gas bill and the rent bill and the light bill. It would be a place where there was a lot of room and the walls didn’t continually walk at you—crowding you.
She reached in a drawer for a pair of white gloves and even as she pulled them on she knew where she was going.
‘A glass of beer,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll get a glass of beer at the Junto on the corner.’ It would take the edge off the loneliness.
Outside on the street, she felt mildly triumphant, for just once she had managed to walk past Mrs. Hedges’ window without being seen. Just once. But no—
‘Dearie, I been thinkin’—’ Mrs. Hedges’ voice halted her.
Mrs. Hedges studied her from head to foot with a calculating eye. ‘If you ever want to make a little extra money, why, you let me know. A nice white gentleman I met lately—’
Lutie walked up the street without answering. Mrs. Hedges’ voice followed her, ‘Just let me know, dearie.’
Sure, Lutie thought, as she walked on, if you live on this damn street you’re supposed to want to earn a little extra money sleeping around nights. With nice white gentlemen.
By the time she reached the Junto Bar and Grill on the corner, she was walking so fast she almost passed it.
4
JONES, THE SUPER, came out of his apartment just in time to catch a glimpse of Lutie striding up the street toward the Junto. She was walking so fast her coat flared out above her straight slim skirt.
As his eyes followed her swift progress up the street, he wished she hadn’t worn such a full coat so that he could have had a better view of her well-shaped hips as she hurried toward the corner. Ever since the night she had first rung his bell to ask about the apartment, he hadn’t
been able to get her out of his mind. She was so tall and brown and young. She made him more aware of the deadly loneliness that ate into him day and night. It was a loneliness born of years of living in basements and sleeping on mattresses in boiler rooms.
The first jobs he had had been on ships and he stayed on them until sometimes it seemed to him he had been buried alive in the hold. He took to talking to himself and dreaming of women—brown women that he would hold in his arms when he got ashore. He used to plan the detail of his love-making until when the dream became a reality and he was actually ashore, he went half-mad with a frenzied kind of hunger that drove the women away from him. When he was younger, he didn’t have any trouble getting women—young, well-built women. It didn’t worry him that they left him after a few days because he could always find others to take their places.
After he left the sea, he had a succession of jobs as a night watchman. And he was alone again. It was worse than the ships. Because he had to sit in the basements and the hallways of vast, empty buildings that were filled with shadows, and the only sound that came to his cars was that made by some occasional passer-by whose footsteps echoed and re-echoed in his eardrums. Until finally he couldn’t stand it any more and got a job as super in a building in Harlem because that way there would be people around him all the time.
He had been on 116th Street for five years. He knew the cellars and the basements in this street better than he knew the outside of streets just a few blocks away. He had fired furnaces and cleaned stairways and put washers in faucets and grown gaunter and lonelier as the years crept past him. He had gone from a mattress by a furnace to basement rooms until finally here in this house he had three rooms to himself—rent free.
But now that he had an apartment of his own, he had grown so much older he found it more and more difficult to get a woman to stay with him. Even women who wanted a refuge and who couldn’t hope to find one anywhere else stayed only three months or so and then were gone. He had thought he would see more people as super of a building, but he was still surrounded by silence. For the tenants didn’t like him and the only time they had anything to do with him was when a roof leaked or a windowpane came out or something went wrong with the plumbing. And so he had developed the habit of spending his spare time outside the buildings in which he worked; looking at the women who went past, estimating them, wanting them.
