by Ann Petry
It ended almost as swiftly as it began. Because she said, ‘All right, I’m crazy.’ Her voice was tight with rage. ‘But either he comes or I go.’
So Pop came. At first he was apologetic about being there and so self-effacing that she was only aware of him as a quiet, gray-haired figure doing the marketing, wiping the dishes, playing gently with the children. And she thought it was working out beautifully. Jim was wrong as usual.
After the first couple of weeks, Pop started drinking openly. She would meet him at the door with a brown-paper package in his hand. He would come downstairs from the bathroom holding himself very straight and eat supper in a genial expansive mood smelling to high heaven of raw whiskey.
He urged her and Jim to go out at night. ‘You’re nothin’ but kids,’ he said, loftily waving his hands to give his words emphasis and managing to get into the gesture a sense of the freedom and joyousness that belonged to the young. ‘Shouldn’t be shut up in the house all day. Go out and have yourselves a time. I’ll look after the kids.’
Somehow he always managed to have a little money and he would take two or three limp dollar bills from his pocket and shove them into her reluctant hands. When she protested, his invariable answer was, ‘Oh, call it room rent if you gotta be formal about it.’
They would head straight for Harlem. The trip rarely included anything more than an evening spent drinking beer in someone’s living room and dancing to a radio. But it was like being let out of jail to be able to forget about the houseful of kids, forget about not having any money. Sometimes they would stop at Junto’s Bar and Grill, not so much to drink the beer as to listen to the juke-box and the warm, rich flow of talk and laughter that rippled through the place. The gay, swirling sounds inside the Junto made both of them believe that one of these days they would be inside a world like that to stay for keeps.
Going home on the subway, Jim would put his arm around her and say, ‘I’ll make it all up to you some day, Lutie. You just wait and see. I’m going to give you everything you ever wanted.’
Just being close to him like that, knowing that they were both thinking much the same thing, shut out the roar and rush of the train, blotted out the other passengers. She would ride home dreaming of the time when she and Jim and Bub would be together—safe and secure and alone.
They were always very late coming home. And walking through the quiet little street they lived on, past the small houses that seemed to nudge against each other in the darkness, she used to imagine that the world at that hour belonged to her and Jim. Just the two of them alone traveling through a world that slept. It was easy to believe it, for there was no sound except that of their own footsteps on the sidewalk.
They would tiptoe into the house so as not to wake Pop and the kids. The living room always smelt strongly of whiskey.
‘The place smells like a gin mill,’ she would say, and giggle as they went up the stairs toward their bedroom. Because somehow the fact of having been away for a while, the lateness of the hour, the stealth with which they had come into the house, made her feel young and carefree.
As they went up the stairs, Jim would put his arm around her waist. His silence, the bulky feel of his shoulders in the darkness, turned their relationship into something mysterious and exciting, and she wanted to put off the moment when she would undress and get in bed beside him, wanted to defer it at the same time that she wanted to hurry it.
It got so they went to Harlem two or three times a week. They wanted to go, anyway, and Pop made it very easy, for he insisted that they go and he invariably proffered a crumpled bill or two with which to finance the trip.
And then all the fun went out of it. Mrs. Griffin, who lived next door, banged on the kitchen door early one morning. She was filled with an indignation that thrust her mouth forward in such an angry pout that Lutie was prepared for something unpleasant.
‘There’s so much noise over here nights ’at my husband and me can’t sleep,’ she said bluntly.
‘Noise?’ Lutie stared at her, not certain that she had heard correctly. ‘What kind of noise?’
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘But it’s got to stop. Sounds like wild parties to me. Las’ night it kept up till all hours. An’ my husband say if somep’n ain’t done about it he’s going to complain.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll see that it doesn’t happen any more.” She said it quickly because she knew what it was. Pop had been having parties on the nights they went to Harlem.
As soon as Mrs. Griffin left the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, Lutie asked Pop about it.
‘Parties?’ he said innocently. His forehead wrinkled as though he were trying to figure out what she was talking about. ‘I ain’t had no parties. Some of my friends come out a coupla times. But I ain’t had no parties.’ His voice sounded hurt.
‘You must have made a lot of noise,’ she said, ignoring his denial of having had any parties. ‘We gotta be careful, Pop. The neighbors might complain to the State people.’
She tried to eliminate the trips to Harlem after that. But Jim was unaccountably and violently suspicious of the headaches that came on suddenly just before they were to leave, of the other thin excuses that she found for not going with him. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she was scared to go off and leave Pop in the house alone.
‘You think I’m too shabby to go out with,’ Jim had said. And then later, ‘Or have you got yourself another boy friend?’
She wouldn’t swallow her pride and tell him about Pop, so they continued going to Harlem two or three times a week. Besides, every time Jim said something about her having a boy friend his face turned resentful, sullen, and she couldn’t bear to see him like that, so she stopped making excuses and pretended an anticipation and an enthusiasm for the trips that she didn’t feel.
Now when she came home she was filled with a fear that made her walk faster and faster, hastening toward their street in her eagerness to ascertain that the house was dark and quiet. Once in bed, she twisted and turned the rest of the night, impatiently waiting for morning to come when the neighbors would soon inform her if anything had happened while they were gone.
She could remember so vividly the night they returned to find the house blazing with light. She got a sick feeling deep in her stomach, for there was an uproar coming from it that could be heard way up the street. As she got closer, she saw there were two police cars pulled up in front of the door.
They walked into the living room and a cop sneered, ‘Little late, ain’t you? The party’s over.’
‘We live here,’ Jim explained.
‘Christ!’ The cop spat in the direction of the floor. ‘No wonder they won’t let you all live near decent people.’
Pop was very drunk. He got up from the sofa where he had been sitting and he was rocking back and forth, though he stood very tall and straight once he finally got his balance. The dignity of his reproachful remarks to the cop was ruined by the fact that the fat woman who had been lolling against him kept reaching both hands out toward him. She was so drunk that she was half-laughing and half-crying at the same time. Her words came out in a blur, ‘Um’s my daddy. Um’s my daddy. Um’s my daddy.’
‘Ain’t got no right to talk like that to a American citizen,’ Pop said, swaying out of the reach of the woman’s clutching hands.
Lutie looked away from Pop. The living room was filled with strange people, with noise and confusion and empty whiskey bottles. The kids were crying upstairs.
It took Jim nearly a half-hour to persuade the cops not to lock everybody up, a half-hour in which she could see his pride and self-respect ooze slowly away while he pleaded, pretending not to hear the gruff asides about ‘drunken niggers.’
Before the cops left, one of them turned to Jim. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you this, boy. It all goes on the report.’
All Jim said to her that night was, ‘You wanted that whiskey-soaked old bum here. Now you’ve got him, I hope you’re satisfied.’
The next afternoon a disapproving white woman arrived and took the children away with her. ‘They can’t stay in a place where there’s any such goings-on as there is here,’ she said.
Lutie pleaded with her, promised her that everything would be different; it couldn’t possibly happen again if she would just let the children stay.
The woman was unmoved. ‘These children belong to your own race, and if you had any feelings at all you wouldn’t want them to stay here,’ she said, going out the door. In less than half an hour she had the youngsters packed and was putting them into a station wagon. She moved competently with no waste motion.
Lutie watched her from the front porch. Damn white people, she thought. Damn them. And then—but it isn’t that woman’s fault. It’s your fault. That’s right, but the reason Pop came here to live was because he couldn’t get a job and we had to have the State children because Jim couldn’t get a job. Damn white people, she repeated.
The house was very quiet and empty with the children gone. Pop fidgeted around for a while, then put his hat and coat on. ‘Got some business in Harlem,’ he explained, not looking at her.
As the day dragged along, she kept thinking with dread of what Jim would say when he came home. He had left the house early to hunt for a job. She hoped that this time he would return swaggering with triumph because he had been successful. She kept remembering how he had pleaded with the cops the night before. Getting a job would make him forget about it. He might not notice the absence of the children.
She fed Bub and bathed him and put him to bed a little earlier than usual. It was something tangible to do. She kept listening for Jim’s key in the lock. When she heard a slight sound at the front door, it was after nine and she hurried into the small hall. But it was Pop looking shamefaced and apologetic at the sight of her.
‘Pop,’ she said, ‘now that the kids are gone, you might as well sleep in one of the bedrooms.’
‘Okay,’ he said humbly.
She undressed and went to bed, but she couldn’t go to sleep. She remembered how she had kept getting out of bed to look up the street, glancing at the clock, listening to footsteps. When Jim finally came at eleven o’clock, she didn’t hear him until he opened the front door. He came straight up the stairs and she turned the light on so he would know she was awake.
He stopped in the tiny upstairs hall and opened the bedroom doors—both of them. She strained her cars to get some clue to his reaction when he saw that Bub was in one of the rooms and Pop was in the other. But there was only silence.
Then he was standing in the door. He was still wearing his hat and overcoat and the sight angered her. He came over to the bed and the room was filled with the smell of cheap gin. And, she thought, he reeks of it. That’s the way he looks for a job—in bars and drinking joints and taverns.
‘Where are the kids?’ he demanded.
‘Did you have any supper?’ she asked.
‘What the hell—you heard me. Where are the kids?’
‘They’re gone. The State woman came and got them this morning.’
‘I suppose you figured if those little bastards were taken away, I’d have to find a job. That I’d go out and make one. Buy one, mebbe.’
‘Oh, Jim, don’t—’ she protested.
‘You knew what would happen when you brought that old booze hound here to live.’
Perhaps if she kept quiet, and let him go on raving without answering him, he would get tired and stop. She bit her lip, looked away from him, and the words came out in spite of her, ‘Don’t you talk about my father like that.’
‘A saint, ain’t he?’ he sneered. ‘He and those old bitches he sleeps with. I suppose I’m not good enough to talk about him.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said wearily.
‘Mebbe it runs in the family. Mebbe that’s why you had him come here. Because you figured with him here you’d be able to get rid of the kids. And that would give you more time to sleep with some Harlem nigger you’ve got your eye on. That’s it, ain’t it?’
‘Shut up!’ This time she shouted. And she saw Pop go quietly down the hall, his worn old traveling bag in his hand. The sight shocked her. He didn’t have any place to go, yet he was leaving because of the way she and Jim were carrying on. ‘Oh, Jim,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s fight. It’s all over and done with. There isn’t any point in quarreling like this.’
‘Oh, yeah? That’s what you think.’ He leaned over the bed. His eyes were bloodshot, angry. ‘I oughtta beat you up and down the block.’ He slapped her across the face.
She was out of bed in a flash. She picked up a chair, the one chair in the bedroom—a straight-backed wooden one. She had painted it with bright yellow enamel shortly after they were married. And she had said, ‘Jim, look. It makes sunlight walk right into the room.’
He had looked at her squatting on the floor, paintbrush in hand, her face glowing as she smiled up at him. He had leaned over and kissed her forehead, saying, ‘Honey, you’re all the sunlight I’ll ever need.’
It was the same chair. And she aimed it at his head as she shouted, ‘You come near me and so help me I’ll kill you.’
It had been a loud, bitter, common fight. It woke Bub up and set him to crying. And it was more than a week afterward before they were able to patch it up. In the meantime the mortgage money was due and, though Jim didn’t say so, she felt that if they lost the house by not being able to pay the interest, it would be her fault.
The Fifth Avenue bus lurched to a stop at 116th Street. She climbed down the steep stairs from the top deck, thinking that if they hadn’t been so damn poor she and Jim might have stayed married. It was like a circle. No matter at what point she started, she always ended up at the same place. She had taken the job in Connecticut so they could keep the house. While she was gone, Jim got himself a slim dark girl whose thighs made him believe in himself again and momentarily released him from his humdrum life.
She had never seen him since the day she had gone to the house in Jamaica and found that other woman there. The only time she had heard from him was when he had forwarded the letter from Mrs. Chandler—and then all he had done was put Pop’s address on the envelope. There had been no messages, no letters—nothing for all these years.
Once Pop had said to her, ‘Hear Jim’s left town. Nobody knows where he went.’
And she was so completely indifferent to anything concerning Jim that she had made no comment. She watched the bus until it disappeared out of sight where Seventh Avenue joins noth Street. This clear understanding she had of what caused Jim to acquire that other woman was because the same thing was happening to her. She was incapable of enduring a bleak and lonely life encompassed by those three dark rooms.
She wondered uneasily if she was fooling herself in believing that she could sing her way out of the street. Suppose it didn’t work and she had to stay there. What would the street do to her? She thought of Mrs. Hedges, the Super, Min, Mrs. Hedges’ little girls. Which one would she be like, say five years from now? What would Bub be like? She shivered as she headed toward home.
8
IT WAS A COLD, CHEERLESS NIGHT. But in spite of the cold, the street was full of people. They stood on the corners talking, lounged half in and half out of hallways and on the stoops of the houses, looking at the street and talking. Some of them were coming home from work, from church meetings, from lodge meetings, and some of them were not coming from anywhere or going anywhere, they were merely deferring the moment when they would have to enter their small crowded rooms for the night.
In the middle of the block there was a sudden thrust of raw, brilliant light where the unshaded bulbs in the big poolroom reached out and pushed back the darkness. A group of men stood outside its windows watching the games going on inside. Their heads were silhouetted against the light.
Lutie, walking quickly through the block, glanced at them and then at the women coming toward her from Eighth Avenue. The women moved slowly. Their should
ers sagged from the weight of the heavy shopping bags they carried. And she thought, That’s what’s wrong. We don’t have time enough or money enough to live like other people because the women have to work until they become drudges and the men stand by idle.
She made an impatient movement of her shoulders. She had no way of knowing that at fifty she wouldn’t be misshapen, walking on the sides of her shoes because her feet hurt so badly; getting dressed up for church on Sunday and spending the rest of the week slaving in somebody’s kitchen.
It could happen. Only she was going to stake out a piece of life for herself. She had come this far poor and black and shut out as though a door had been slammed in her face. Well, she would shove it open; she would beat and bang on it and push against it and use a chisel in order to get it open.
When she opened the street door of the apartment house, she was instantly aware of the silence that filled the hall. Mrs. Hedges had been quiet, too, for if she was sitting in her window she had given no indication of her presence.
There was no sound except for the steam hissing in the radiator. The silence and the dimly lit hallway and the smell of stale air depressed her. It was like a dead weight landing on her chest. She told herself that she mustn’t put too much expectation in getting the singing job. Almost anything might happen to prevent it. Boots might change his mind.
She went up the stairs, thinking, But he can’t. She wouldn’t let him. It meant too much to her. It was a way out—the only way out of here and she and Bub had to get out.
On the third-floor landing she stopped. A man was standing in the hall. His back was turned toward her. She hesitated. It wasn’t very late, but it was dark in the hall and she was alone.
He turned then and she saw that he had his arms wound tightly around a girl and he was pressed so close to her and was bending so far over her that they had given the effect of one figure. He wore a sailor’s uniform and the collar of his jacket was turned high around his neck, for it was cold in the hall.
