If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  As she stood in Penn Station, still on the platform, everything, it seemed, began to pull away from her before she had a chance to do anything about it. Like a scab. She picked at it at first, and then she peeled off the colored-out-of-wedlock-mother mask and threw it onto the tracks. Another train would come soon to mash it against the rails.

  Which is what she should have done with the rest of her had she not been, well, too afraid. She remembered being tired, as children whose mothers don’t put them to bed are tired, so worn out that they sit in the middle of the floor and cry. Like her own son would do, because he stayed awake waiting for her.

  Bad mommy.

  “Ma’am, you sure you don’t need he’p?”

  “My goodness, I’m still standing here, aren’t I?” She gave the old redcap a dollar for his trouble, went upstairs to the counter, waited in line with people who were in a rush, but she wasn’t. She cashed in her ticket, which would cover the money she owed her roommate and the babysitter. And nothing else.

  So when she left the great columns of Penn Station on 34th Street, she had to walk back to 125th Street in Harlem in the heels that were giving her blisters. It helped her bear it to know that when she got home, she’d leave the money with her neighbor, put her head into the oven, and be done with it. Just like that. Done.

  ———

  The bars were open on Forty-second Street. Against the white heat, their dark doorways emitted an old, boozy, smoky smell, some vulgar cousin to the polished-wood scent of her hotel lounge.

  Outside one bar a tall white man stood in a summer suit, right hand in his pocket, smoking. He was about thirty, fit, debonair. Jack Thompson looked as if he’d just stepped off a magazine cover. He watched her coming toward him and touched his two fingers to his forehead in a silent salute when she came to within three feet.

  “I wish I could offer you something you might want right now.” He said it quietly as she passed.

  She slowed, feeling a tiny, hopeful thrill, the little match girl’s first tiny flame, and he stepped across the sidewalk to meet her.

  “Is there anything a stranger can offer a princess?” His was a smooth baritone radio-announcer voice.

  “Nothing at all, thank you,” she said. She perked up despite herself, despite suspecting a con job and worse to come, but it didn’t matter now, because she was going home to the oven, so nothing mattered anymore. For a moment she was free, a feeling so delightful that she smiled quite spontaneously. Then, “You could offer me a cigarette,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  He took out his pack, shook one out, lit it with a silver lighter, and handed it to her. From inside the bar Jewell heard a fight. She wondered that she hadn’t noticed until now.

  “Thanks,” she said, turning her face away from his eyes toward the ruckus inside the bar.

  Immediately, a white man with red hair exploded out the doorway; a second followed him. They wrestled, hit each other drunkenly, cursed. A third lumbered after them, a once-powerful man gone to fat, carrying a hammer.

  “Botha you. I’ma clean house today. I’ll fix botha you,” he said.

  She remembered thinking that the hammer was just a threat.

  The first two rolled about on the sidewalk some more, now bent not only on hurting each other but on staying out of the way of the hammer as the big man approached.

  Jack cupped Jewell’s upper arm gently and guided her away from the melee and out of the crowd, most nearly drunk, who gathered around the fighters.

  Suddenly, one of the two wrestlers on the ground broke away, ran down the street, and ducked into an alley. The redhead was left. He stood confused, cursing at the man with the hammer, who swung the tool at his face, catching the side of the redhead’s jaw with the hammer’s claw. The big man’s follow-through carried him down to the ground, where he hit his head. The redhead, wobbly but still standing, felt the bottom of his jaw, which was bleeding.

  “Omigod. Gotta get ’im to a hospital,” someone yelled.

  Others took up the cry. “Hospital. He needs a hospital.”

  “Needs a drink,” he answered them. Pointing to the hammer man on his knees on the ground, he said triumphantly, “He needs a hospital.” Then he kicked the man on the ground and wheeled back into the bar.

  “What are you doing here?” Jewell asked Jack.

  “What am I doing here?” He pivoted, whistled for a taxi, and then guided her into it. “I’ll drop you off,” he said, as if in answer. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere,” she said. “I’m going nowhere.”

  “That can’t really be true.” He scanned her hair and suit and shoes appreciatively.

  She acknowledged his look. “You’re right. I have to go to my friend’s apartment and give her back these clothes.” She told him the address, which he relayed to the driver.

  “Then what will you wear?”

  “Nothing. If you’re not going anywhere, you don’t need to wear anything, do you?”

  “You could come with me.”

  She dismissed the suggestion with the tiniest bat of an eyelid. He lit two fresh cigarettes and handed her one. She lay back in the taxi and inhaled deeply, because it was such luxury to ride in a taxi and to smoke a fresh cigarette, to have it lit by a man with money in his pockets who didn’t ask for anything in return.

  She was told that her mother used to say something will turn up. For her, something always had.

  Jack took a thin silver flask from his breast pocket and offered her a sip of whiskey. She liked the idea of having a drink before she did the deed.

  “Thanks for the ride and the smoke and the drink,” she said prettily when she got out.

  He ran a quick eye over the place and registered no emotion. “Our little adventure.” It was a dump, but so was the bar. “Look, won’t you come with me?” he asked, as if it mattered to him. “I want to take your photograph. So I can see you whenever I want to.”

  “People have taken my photograph. No, thank you. You’ll just have to remember me as I was.”

  He frowned. “What’s that about?”

  “Good-bye,” she said as she swung her long legs, ankles together. Then she got out, and blew him a kiss.

  ———

  Upstairs, she gave the neighbor her money. Jewell cut their conversation short. Inside her apartment, she took off the suit and hung it on the bedroom door. She put the rest of the money into the shoes and lined them up on the closet floor. She washed the blouse with dish detergent and hung it to dry on a hanger on the doorknob.

  Then, very quickly, before she lost her nerve, she propped the coffee table at an angle to the oven, and blew out the pilot light. She felt a thin but thrilling satisfaction that she was actually going through with it. She looked into the oven to double-check the size. It was filthy with coated grease and blackened cooking drippings. Feeling a rising panic, Jewell ran into the bedroom, grabbed her pillow, and laid it on the rack. There was only one. She turned up the gas and lay down, resting her head on the pillow, hoping to God to be asleep, which is how she thought of it, before any roaches appeared.

  She closed her eyes and breathed, waiting for stillness to descend again now that she had everything, everything, under control. The smell of gas and filth made her nauseous at first. She remembered Selma’s scrubbing her oven with steel wool and lye soap. The thought of Selma made her face and bowels feel hot. She tried to keep herself from despair. She’d hidden it from herself. The gas jet made a hissing sound. Interesting.

  She squeezed her eyes to keep them shut as tears ran toward her hairline. Behind her lids, she saw the picture of Lonnie in the little white christening suit her father sent, no doubt at Selma’s urging. Jewell had the photo taken, but never accomplished the actual christening. She had not believed in heaven or hell until this moment.

  Bad Mommy.

  Night-night.

  ———

  Then she heard that smooth voice at the edge of her consciousness, where shame and hilarit
y bled together. “Stay there. And keep the neighbors from gawking.”

  ———

  Jack stepped off the magazine cover to pull her from the oven, turn off the gas, wrap her in his jacket, and take her downstairs to the cab. They drove with windows open, and he spoke sharply to the driver. She heard him say that she’d had a little too much. She woke in a hotel, dizzy, sick to her stomach, looking up at a ceiling fan.

  “Oh, God,” she remembers saying. “Oh, shit.” She knew that she would never have the courage to do it again, and that she would never stop crying. The grief felt endless, as if it had started before she was born and would continue beyond her, irreparable; she was its vessel. “I can’t stand it.”

  He sat next to her for a long time while she cried. When it was dark, he ordered deli sandwiches and coffee and more cigarettes. Then he spoke.

  “Look,” he said, “I need a wife. It would do me a great good to return home to Boston with a wife.”

  “You have some lies goin?”

  “Yes. I lie. I lie all the time, but that’s the worst of it.”

  “You have money?”

  The hotel had to cost plenty. She squinted to see whether he was lying about the money. He nodded to reassure her. “I do have money,” he said, seeming to take no offense. “Some. Some money. My father’s will leaves me a trust fund, but with two conditions: I must have a job and I have to get married. My mother’s been indulgent, so I’ve studied and traveled.

  “But if I don’t marry by the end of this year, the money goes to a fund for the protection of wildlife. Not my wild life, obviously.

  “So, I have secured a job with Philip Morris. I’m being transferred to Boston.”

  “I wish you hadn’t taken me out.”

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “That’s so stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no such thing.” It was too much for her to be bothered. It seemed like a nasty joke. “I could be black, you know. You don’t know me at all. I could be a Negro.”

  “Better and better,” he said. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. “My father’s father owned minstrel theaters. So, we’re connected. It’s poetic justice. I knew I had to go back for you.” He grinned. “You are quite perfect.”

  “Blackface?” She couldn’t quite take it in.

  “Of course you are black or you wouldn’t have said it. This is very funny. But you have it, a very rare quality. You know it, of course. It’s star power. Will you marry me? And move to Boston with me and take college courses and give dinner parties? We’ll know what kind of marriage it is, and therefore we’ll just have fun instead of trying to fix each other. Let’s.” He reached toward the lamp in order to see better her beautiful face.

  “No, please, don’t turn on the light.” The only thing she wanted was to sit and smoke quietly in a dark room. How else could she gain the courage to go to Boston to marry or pretend to marry, who knew, a tobacco executive whose inheritance came from coon shows. “My family used to raise tobacco,” she said. “My great-grandmother told me how they stayed in the smoke barn flue-curing tobacco for three days, watching that the leaves didn’t dry too fast or stay too moist. They had to turn bunches of leaves on the string and keep the fire just so.”

  He was watching her take it in. “I know,” he said. “There are a lot of disincentives. But the whole deal is perfectly absurd. That’s why it’s perfect. I know it.” He laughed to himself. Then he got serious.

  “Look, I’m not a bad guy. Once, at boarding school, I pulled a kid out of the ice. No, really. Truth.” He put his hand up in an Eagle Scout pledge. “I knew that the ice was bad where he was. I told him not to go there, and then when it started to crack, I’d gone the other way to the dock, and I knew the rope was there, and that if I tied it around myself, I could grab him and pull the two of us back.

  “It’s the only other good thing I ever did, and I was absolutely certain about it. I’m certain about this.”

  “Because you like to rescue people?”

  “Maybe. Hadn’t thought of it that way. It occurred to me today that—”

  Jewell was listening now that he was speaking to her from behind his cool façade. She wanted some solution. The place where Lonnie buried his head against her still burned with shame.

  “What?”

  “Have you ever been honest with a man? I mean, my parents’ marriage was really an exchange. They talked about love, but I never felt it between them. I’ve been behaving like a kid about this—you know they say, ‘Eat your vegetables,’ so you spit them out.”

  Jewell laughed grimly, but said nothing.

  “What I objected to about marriage was the pretense, but maybe we could do less of that, and in a year, if we don’t like it, we can split.”

  Jewell asked: “A real marriage? Legal?”

  “No point otherwise. Besides, maybe I do like to rescue people.” He ran his hand along her arm. “And I could look at you forever. Maybe we’ll have a ball. The signs are auspicious.”

  He lit another cigarette for them to share and handed it to her, and began to rub her feet.

  Jewell lay back on the bed, smoking, enjoying his hands. As far as Selma and Bobo would ever know, if they ever found out anything, she’d been carried out of the building and disappeared. It might as well be a suicide. She’d be gone, she thought, and whoever she became would be something else: a creation. She wondered whether this was a chance to make herself over and get it right. The man sitting opposite her remained as he appeared earlier, cool and magazine-handsome, matter-of-fact, amused by the day’s work, but also suddenly almost credible. “Remember the redheaded man at the bar? Remember how he went back inside when everyone said he should go to the hospital after the guy bashed him with the hammer?”

  “That’s how you feel to be alive again? But, my dear, you were not going to the hospital. I thought about it, but you looked like you were coming to. That sounds as if I were gambling.”

  Redeem the time. Selma used to sing a hymn with that phrase. She’d sing it low and off-tune, with more lyrics Jewell could not recall, but that urged them to work harder. You could never work hard enough for Selma. How could this man be talking about getting a trust fund that he hadn’t worked for? How could she simply step off one track with nothing and onto another with sandwiches and coffee and hotels, talking marriage to a white man who took taxis on a whim?

  ———

  After her run, Jewell returned to her vestibule full of moist dog smell, and to the man who had started marriage as a lark, and then grown into it, as she had, with sincere gratitude for a chance to give and receive love.

  But she could still see Jack as he’d been that night in the hotel, sleek and amused: he unbuttoned his shirt. “So, how long have you wanted to pass for white?”

  She started to shake her head no.

  “C’mon, now. Don’t kid a kidder.” He undid his belt and button and zipper and slipped off his pants.

  She shrugged as he approached and laid a condom on the bedstand.

  “Let’s not do kids, shall we? You don’t have any, of course?”

  She shook her head. Now that he’d confessed to being a liar, she could lie without qualms. She was a cicada shell, stuck on the side of a tree, tiny bulging casings over the eyes, claw casings holding on. Whoever was inside had fled.

  He stood her on her feet, and ran a hand lightly over her torso. “You can say no,” he said. “But I thought that we’d just get married and pretend to be a perfect couple. Who knows? Maybe we can beat the odds and enjoy it. I can stop cutting off my own inheritance to spite my father. And meanwhile, we’ll have lots of sex and chicken salad sandwiches. That’s at least as good as your alternative.”

  She shrugged again, and he began to undress her, checking as he did for her assent, and admiring her flawless body. “If we get married,” she asked, “can I go to college?”

  “Sure. That’s the idea. So, if you don’t like me after a while,
you can do as you please.

  “I like this place,” he said, referring to the hotel. “It’s warm.”

  He rubbed her so lightly that it almost tickled. “Were you going to go through with it today?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to disappear.”

  “No, you don’t. You want everybody to look at you and feel just as I do right now.”

  He’s never been black, she thought. What she said was: “Today’s my birthday.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “That’s a lie,” she said.

  He laughed, kissed her, and slipped in a finger in one deft, delighted movement.

  That’s when she decided to do it. She would lean her despair against his delight and rest in it.

  ———

  Now, how can she tell her son, the thirty-year-old builder with his first city contract, a truth more stupid and pathetic than any lie she’s ever told: that she decided to marry a white man she didn’t know because, at that moment, she felt certain he wouldn’t hit her.

  CHAPTER 15

  When Selma awoke, it was past 10:00 a.m., bright sun and mild. She’d dreamt of her married youth. Lying very still on her side, she prolonged the dream and held off the certain awakening into aloneness.

  ———

  Check your damn fences.

  Like a feudal lord, Needham is everywhere on his land at all times. He and the boys and Selma and then Bobo, together with brother Richard and his family, and Amos and Mary’s children who come in the summer: they invest each acre with their presence—their plows, threshers, mills, hitches, wagons, and trucks; their homemade blacksmith operation; their mules and mare, the nanny goat and kids, the big brown-and-yellow milk cow the brothers share, the chickens that lay green-and-white pullet eggs; their voices sing in time to the implements and change with the rhythm of the season; the stench of their fertilizer and the whiff of brown creek water that collects behind their sticks-and-stone dam and runs through ditches across the new orchard; the hum of bees from the hive boxes they build at the edge of the south field. Whatever they can buy or claim stamps Needham into each tidy corner.