“Looks like Christmas should, don’t it?” The man slid his chin over his girl’s head and his nostrils widened as he smelled her hair.
“Sure does,” Luther said, surprised it didn’t come out “Sure do” in an all-white car.
“Heading home?”
“Yeah.”
“To family?” The white guy lowered his cigarette to his girl’s lips and she opened her mouth to take a drag.
“Wife and child,” Luther said.
The man closed his eyes for a second and nodded. “That’s good.”
“Yes, sir, it is.” Luther swallowed against the wave of solitude that tried to rise in him.
“Merry Christmas,” the man said and took his cigarette from his girl’s lips and put it between his own.
“Same to you, sir.”
In the Giddreauxs’ foyer, he removed his coat and scarf and hung them, wet and steaming, on the radiator. He could hear voices coming from the dining room and he smoothed the snow into his hair with his palms and then wiped his palms on his coat.
When he opened the door into the main house, he heard the overlapping laughter and overlapping chatter of several conversations. Silverware and glasses clinked and he smelled roast turkey and maybe a deep-fried one as well and some kind of cinnamon scent that might have come from hot cider. Four children came running down the stairs toward him, three colored, one white, and they laughed maniacally in his face when they reached the first floor and then ran full-out down the hall toward the kitchen.
He opened the pocket doors to the dining room and the guests turned to look at him, women mostly, a few older men and two about Luther’s age whom he took to be the sons of Mrs. Grouse, the Giddreauxs’ housekeeper. Just over a dozen people, all told, and half of them white, and Luther recognized the females who helped out at the NAACP and assumed the males were their husbands.
“Franklin Grouse,” a younger colored man said and shook Luther’s hand. He extended a glass of eggnog. “You must be Luther. My mother told me about you.”
“Nice to meet you, Franklin. Merry Christmas.” Luther raised his glass of eggnog and took a drink.
It was a wonderful dinner. Isaiah had returned from Washington the night before and promised he wouldn’t talk politics until after dessert, so they ate and drank and chided the children when they got a little too boisterous and the talk jumped from the latest picture shows to popular books and songs and then to the rumor that war radios would become a consumer item that would broadcast news and voices and plays and songs from all over the world, and Luther tried to picture how a play could be performed through a box, but Isaiah said it was to be expected. Between phone lines and telegraphs and Sopwith Camels, the future of the world was air. Air travel, air communication, air ideas. Soil was played out, ocean, too; but air was like a train track that never met the sea. Soon we’d be speaking Spanish and they’d be speaking English.
“That a good thing, Mr. Giddreaux?” Franklin Grouse said.
Isaiah tilted his hand from left-to-right, left-to-right. “It’s what man makes of it.”
“White man or black man?” Luther asked, and the table broke out laughing.
The happier and more comfortable he became, the sadder he felt. This could be his life—should be his life—with Lila, right now, not as a guest at the table but as the head of it and maybe some of those children would have been his, too. He caught Mrs. Giddreaux smiling at him, and when he met her smile with his own, she gave him a wink, and he could see her soul again, the supple grace of it, and it was lit with blue light.
At the end of the evening, after most of the guests had left and Isaiah and Yvette were taking their brandy with the Parthans, two old friends since his days at Morehouse and hers at Atlanta Baptist, Luther excused himself and went up to the roof with his own glass of brandy and let himself out onto the widow’s walk. The snow had stopped falling, but all the roofs were thick with it. Horns bayed from the harbor and the lights of the city spread a yellow band across the lowest reaches of the sky. He closed his eyes and sucked in the smell of the night and the snow and cold, the smoke and soot and brick dust. He felt as if he were snorting the sky right off the outermost curve of the earth. He kept his eyes shut tight and blocked out the death of Jessie and the stone-ache in his heart that had only one name: Lila. He asked only for this moment, this air that he held in his lungs, that filled his body and swelled in his head.
But it didn’t work—Jessie came crashing through, turning to Luther to say, “Kinda fun, huh?” and less than a second later pieces of his head went popping off and he fell to the floor. The Deacon, too, the Deacon of all people, surfaced in the wave that followed Jessie, and Luther saw him clutching at him, heard him saying, “Make this right,” and his eyes bulged with the universal plea not to be extinguished, not today, as Luther shoved the gun under his chin, and those bulging eyes said I’m not ready to go. Wait.
But Luther hadn’t waited. And now the Deacon was somewhere with Jessie and Luther was up here, aboveground. It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.
“Why won’t you write me, woman?” Luther whispered it to the starless sky. “You carrying my child, and I don’t want him growing up without me. Don’t want him knowing that feeling. No, no, girl,” he whispered, “there’s only you. Only you.”
He lifted his brandy off the brick ledge and took a drink that singed his throat and warmed his chest and widened his eyes.
“Lila,” he whispered and took another drink.
“Lila.” He said it to the yellow slice of moon, to the black sky, to the smell of the night and the roofs covered in snow.
“Lila.” He put it on the wind, like a fly he didn’t have the heart to kill, and willed it to carry itself to Tulsa.
Luther Laurence, meet Helen Grady.”
Luther shook the older woman’s hand. Helen Grady had a grip as firm as Captain Coughlin’s and a similar trim build, gunmetal hair, and a fearless gaze.
“She’ll be working with you from here on out,” the captain said.
Luther nodded, noticing she wiped her hand on her pristine apron as soon as she took it back from his grip.
“Captain, sir, where’s—?”
“Nora has left our employ, Luther. I noted a fondness between the two of you, and so I inform you of her dismissal with a measure of empathy for the bond you shared, but she is never to be spoken of in this home again.” The captain placed a firm hand on Luther’s shoulder and gave him a smile just as firm. “Clear?”
“Clear,” Luther said.
Luther found Danny as Danny was returning to his rooming house one night. He stepped out from the building and said, “Fuck did you do?”
Danny’s right hand drifted toward his coat, and then he recognized Luther. He dropped his hand.
“No ‘Hi’?” Danny said. “‘Happy New Year’? Anything like that?”
Luther said nothing.
“Okay.” Danny shrugged. “First, this ain’t the best neighborhood to be a colored in, or haven’t you noticed?”
“I’ve been out here an hour. I noticed.”
“Second,” Danny said, “are you fucking crazy talking to a white man like that? A cop?”
Luther took a step back. “She was right.”
“What? Who?”
“Nora. She said you were an act. You play the rebel. Play the man who says he don’t believe in being called ‘suh,’ but now you tell me where it’s okay for a nigger like me to go in this city, tell me how I’s supposed to talk to your whiteness in public. Where’s Nora?”
Danny held out his arms. “How do I know? Why don’t you go see her at the shoe factory? You know where it is, don’t you?”
“’Cause our hours conflict.” Luther stepped to Danny, realizing people were starting to notice them. It would hardly be unreasonable for someone to whack him in the back of the head with a stick or just flat out shoot him for
stepping up to a white man like this in an Italian neighborhood. In any neighborhood.
“Why do you think I had anything to do with Nora leaving the house?”
“Because she loved you and you couldn’t live with it.”
“Luther, step back.”
“You step back.”
“Luther.”
Luther cocked his head.
“I’m serious.”
“You’re serious? Anyone in the world looked close at that girl, they saw a whole country of pain had already paid its respects to her. And you, you—what?—you added to it? You and your whole family?”
“My family?”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t like my family, Luther, take it up with my father.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I need the fucking job.”
“Then I guess you should go home now. Hope you still have it in the morning.”
Luther took another couple of steps back. “How’s your union going?”
“What?”
“Your dream of a workers brotherhood? How’s that?”
Danny’s face flattened, as if it had been run over. “Go home, Luther.”
Luther nodded. He gulped some air. He turned and started walking.
“Hey!” Danny called.
Luther looked back at him standing by his building in the early evening cold.
“Why’d you come all the way out here? To dress down a white man in public?”
Luther shook his head. He turned to start walking again.
“Hey! I asked you a question.”
“Because she’s better than your whole fucking family!” Luther took a bow in the middle of the sidewalk. “Got that, white boy? Go grab your noose, string me up, whatever the fuck you Yankees do up here. And you do? I’ll know I died speaking truth to your fucking lie. She is better than your whole family.” He pointed at Danny. “Better than you, especially.”
Danny’s lips moved.
Luther took a step toward him. “What? What’s that?”
Danny put a hand on his doorknob. “I said you’re probably right.”
He turned the knob and entered his building and Luther stood alone on the steadily darkening street, raggedy Italians stabbing him with their almond eyes as they passed.
He chuckled. “Shit,” he said. “I got him and his horseshit where it lived.” He smiled at an angry old lady trying to slide past him. “Don’t that beat all, ma’am?”
Yvette called to him soon as he entered the house. He came into the parlor with his coat still on because her voice sounded fearful. But as he entered, he saw that she was smiling, as if she’d been touched by a divine joy.
“Luther!”
“Ma’am?” Luther used one hand to unbutton his topcoat.
She stood there, beaming. Isaiah came through the dining room and entered the parlor behind her. He said, “Evening, Luther.”
“Evening, Mr. Giddreaux, sir.”
Isaiah wore a small private smile as he took a seat in the armchair by his teacup.
“What?” Luther said. “What?”
“Did you have a good 1918?” Isaiah said.
Luther looked away from Yvette’s bursting smile and met Isaiah’s tiny one. “Uh, sir, in point of fact, no, I did not have a good 1918. Bit troublesome if you need to know the truth, sir.”
Isaiah nodded. “Well, it’s over.” He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece: ten-forty-three. “Almost twenty-four-hours over.” He looked over at his wife. “Oh, stop your teasing, Yvette. It’s starting to torture me.” He gave Luther a look—women—and then he said, “Come on now. Give it to the boy.”
Yvette crossed the floor to him and for the first time Luther noticed that she’d kept her hands behind her back since he’d entered the room. Her body was rippling, and her smile kept sliding, topsy-turvy, all over her face.
“This is for you.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek and placed an envelope in his hand. She stepped back.
Luther looked down at the envelope—simple, cream-colored, standard in every way. He saw his name in the center. Saw the Giddreauxs’ address below it. He recognized the lettering—the way it managed to be tight and looping at the same time. He recognized the postmark over the stamp: Tulsa, Okla. His hands shook.
He looked in Yvette’s eyes.
“What if it’s good-bye?” He felt his lips tighten hard against his teeth.
“No, no,” she said. “She already said good-bye, son. You said she’d closed her heart. Closed hearts don’t write letters to men who love them, Luther. They just don’t.”
Luther nodded, his head as shaky as the rest of him. He thought of Christmas night, of putting her name on the breeze.
“I—”
They watched him.
“I’m going to read it upstairs,” he said.
Yvette patted his hand. “Just promise me you won’t jump.”
Luther laughed, the sound coming out high, like something that had been popped. “I…I won’t, ma’am.”
As he climbed the stairs, terror struck him. Terror that Yvette was wrong, that plenty of women wrote to say good-bye. He thought of folding the letter and putting it into his pocket and not reading it for a while. Until he was stronger, say. But even as the thought occurred to him he knew he had a better chance of waking up white tomorrow than waking up with that envelope still sealed.
He stepped out onto the roof and stood with his head down for a moment. He didn’t pray, but he didn’t quite not-pray either. He kept his head lowered and closed his eyes and let his fear wash over him, his horror at being without her for life.
Please don’t hurt me, he thought, and opened the envelope carefully and just as carefully pulled out her letter. Please don’t. He held it between the thumb and index finger of each hand, letting the night breeze dry his eyes, and then he unfolded it:
Dear Luther,
It is cold here. I now wash laundry for folks that send it down from Detroit Avenue in big gray bags. It is a kindness I can thank Aunt Marta for since I know folks can get there laundry cleaned any old way. Aunt Marta and Uncle James have been my salvation and I know the Lord works through them. They said to tell you they wish you well—
Luther smiled, doubting all hell out of that.
—and hope you are all right. My belly is big. It is a boy Aunt Marta says for my belly points to the right. I feel this to. His feet are big and kicking. He will look like you he will need you to be his daddy. You have to find your way home.
Lila. Your wife.
Luther read it six more times before he could say for sure that he took a breath. No matter how many times he closed his eyes and opened them in hopes she had signed it “Love,” that word did not appear on the page.
And yet…You have to find your way home and he will need you to be his daddy and Dear Luther and most important…Your wife.
Your wife.
He looked back at the letter. He unfolded it again. Held it taut between his fingers.
You have to find your way home.
Yes, ma’am.
Dear Luther.
Dear Lila.
Your wife.
Your husband.
BABE RUTH and the WHITE BALL
CHAPTER twenty-four
At noon on the fifteenth of January, 1919, the United States Industrial Alcohol company’s molasses tank exploded in the North End. A vagrant child, standing beneath the tank, was vaporized, and the molasses flooded into the heart of the slum in waves three stories high. Buildings were heaved to the side as if by a callous hand. The railway trestle that ran along Commercial was hit with a scrap of metal the size of a truck. The center of the trestle collapsed. A firehouse was hurled across a city square and turned on its end. One fireman perished, a dozen were injured. The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear, but Mayor Andrew Peters, the first politician to arrive on the scene, stated that there was little doubt terrorists
were to blame.
Babe Ruth read every newspaper account he could lay his mitts on. He skipped any long stretches where words like municipal and infrastructure were commonly used, but otherwise it tickled him to his core. Astounded him. Molasses! Two million gallons! Fifty-foot waves! The streets of the North End, closed off to automobiles, carts, and horses, stole the shoes of those who tried to walk them. Flies battled for pavement in swarms as dark and thick as candied apples. In the plaza behind the city stables, dozens of horses had been maimed by rivets that had flown like bullets from the exploding tank. They’d been found mired in the muck, neighing hideously, unable to rise from the sticky mess. In the middle of that afternoon, forty-five police gunshots punctuated their execution like the last blasts of a fireworks show. The dead horses were lifted by cranes and placed on the flatbeds of trucks and transported to a glue factory in Somerville. By the fourth day, the molasses had turned to black marble and residents walked with their hands pressed to walls and streetlamp poles.
Seventeen confirmed dead now and hundreds injured. Good God—the looks that must have been on their faces when they turned and saw those black waves curl up by the sun. Babe sat at the soda counter in Igoe’s Drugstore and Creamery in Codman Square waiting for his agent, Johnny Igoe. Johnny was in the back, primping for their meeting with A. L. Ulmerton, probably going too heavy on the petroleum jelly, the cologne, the toilet water. A. L. Ulmerton was the big cheese of Old Gold cigarettes (“Not a cough in a carload!”) and he wanted to talk to Babe about possible endorsements. And now Johnny was going to make them late with his showgirl fussing in back.
The Given Day Page 38
