by Joanna Scott
From the opposite sidewalk the crowd watched smoke seep from crevices and broken windows. Here and there a flame appeared to wave wickedly and then hid before the firemen could steer the hose. Little Rosie Peet stood clutching her doll and hopping back and forth from one bare foot to the other, splashing her toes in the spill-off that collected against the curb, squealing with delight. The older children watched solemnly, even proudly, for they were taking part in a magnificent event and would have something to tell their friends in school the next day.
A fireman named Floyd Coolidge climbed the fire escape to our apartment. He found my father lying in a stupor in the hallway outside his bedroom. Floyd picked him up like he would have picked up a suitcase and then dragged him by one arm through the smoky apartment and out to the fire escape. With the help of another fireman he carried my father down to the street, where he was roused to sputtering rage by the ammonia a medic held under his nose. The two firemen returned to join their crew, who kept the hoses blasting even after the fire was out, as if filling a huge container.
My father spent two days in the hospital. I went to fetch him on Monday morning. While I buttoned his shirt to his Arrow collar, he stared sullenly at me. I knew by then that he’d heard the story about the cause of the fire, and I guessed what he was thinking: his own daughter had been willing to sacrifice her father, her own dear father, for the sake of a hoodlum boy. Sure, he’d be better off dead, he’d be the first to admit it, but as long as he was still alive he would never forgive me.
Since the fire, we’ve been staying in the Shannonso, in a two-room suite on the seventh floor. From the window in the sitting room I can look out upon our building. The bricks are streaked from the rooftop to the third floor with soot, the windowpanes are shattered, and the plate glass of Scarooms has been boarded over, though the sign still hangs lopsided on its metal bracket. The building will be demolished eventually, though it will probably have to wait until the war is over.
I don’t know much about the boy I risked so many lives to save. On the way to the precinct he told my husband that his name was Wally and that he’d climbed with his dad to the rooftop simply to see the view. According to the story in the newspaper, the boy’s name is Wallace Michaud and he lives with his family in New Jersey. His father, so the reporter claimed, led the boy to the roof of our building to have a smoke and meet a friend, a real estate shark keen on buying up property in our neighborhood. The police say the matter is under investigation.
My husband still has his job cooking at a Midtown steak house. Most of my former neighbors have found temporary accommodations with friends or relatives, though Therese Poulee and Glenn McDuff are both living on different floors here at the Shannonso.
I don’t do much more than take care of my father, who sits propped on the threadbare sofa, scowling with indignant satisfaction, having concluded that his own daughter is responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world. I bring him his tea and cinnamon toast and settle across from him in a chair. My mind drifts, and I keep thinking about the strange beauty of the fire spreading on the rooftop. To escape my father’s eyes I open a book; any old paperback is fine, for I’m only pretending to read.
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA IS AFRAID OF SNOW
The girl didn’t want anything to change. She especially liked it when her mama came home late from her job at the lunchroom wearing her juniper perfume and tussled with her across the mattress they shared, tickling her in the armpits, giving her butterfly kisses with her wiry eyelashes, laughing the same way she wept, the fullness of the sound threatening to shatter her bones, which would never happen, the girl knew, since Mama was as strong as the young tree planted in front of the Lafayette, a second Tree of Hope to replace the first, which had finally grown so old it would have toppled some windy day if the authorities hadn’t chopped it down.
Granny was growing old. Actually, Granny was the child’s great-grandmother and liked to remind her of that, her great age being her main claim to dignity. The old woman’s own daughter, Mama’s mama, had died long ago, so Granny had raised Mama “by hand,” as she said, the plan being that someday Mama would take care of Granny. But it hadn’t turned out that way. Granny had to keep on selling baked sweet potatoes and popcorn from a cart on Lenox because Mama spent her own wages at a gin mill and every few days came home drunk, which was how the child liked her best, when Mama was in a laughing mood. But there were bound to be words exchanged between Granny and Mama, hardly an even exchange, since out of Granny’s mouth flew complaints pitched at top volume, while from Mama came the softest whisper, “Leave off, Gran,” her gentle voice enough to make Granny reach for the belt.
The last time Granny lit into Mama was in sticky-hot weather, when Mama came home so saturated that she sweated gin. She’d been too tired to play much, though she did draw her daughter onto her lap and rock her until they both fell back giggling on the mattress. Granny, of course, didn’t find any of it funny, and she struck at Mama’s bare arms with the leather so hard that by the time the whipping was done Mama looked like she’d been picked over by crows. But she didn’t cry. She just stood up, tottered over to Granny, said something in too low a voice for the girl to hear, and walked out the door.
A few days into June, when the girl began to understand that her mama wouldn’t be home any time soon, she made herself nice and sick with a throat so swollen she could hardly swallow and a fever hotter than the hottest day in Harlem. She knew that her sweat didn’t smell as sweet as Mama’s, but Granny paid no mind to the stink. When the child couldn’t even stand on her own two feet one morning, Granny slung her over her shoulder like one of those burlap sacks full of potatoes she bought at the market and carried her five blocks to the hospital, where she was told to have a seat.
Now Granny wasn’t one to do, necessarily, as she was told, but on this occasion she didn’t have much of a choice, what with dozens of sickly souls clamoring like the multitude for salvation and many more just politely waiting their turn, silent except for their coughing and heaving and their wailing children. The girl noticed that what she at first took to be a pillow held by the woman next to her was really a baby bundled in its mother’s arms. It wasn’t asleep—its little eyes were half open, dull as the eyes of an old dog, while the mother’s eyes were glittering and so fixed on the wall clock they might have been attached to it by thread. After a while the girl grew bored waiting for the baby to do something interesting, and she shut her own eyes and lay across Granny’s lap, the sounds of the hospital melting together, dripping in ice-cold drops onto her skin, making her whole body twitch and tremble. She’d come in red-hot and here she was shivering from the worst cold she’d ever felt. She kept trying to cover herself with whatever was available—her granny’s apron, her own dress folded back over her arms, even a corner of the blanket belonging to the sick baby, but when she tried to snatch the blanket her hands were yanked back by Granny, who could do no better than wrap her own thin arms around the girl and try to squeeze away the shivers.
The girl gave up hoping to feel warm and instead let the fever’s blizzard bury her in drifts of snow until she could breathe only in quick sucks, as though she were taking in air through a straw. The clackety sound her teeth made reminded her of Granny’s cart rolling up Lenox Avenue early in the morning, the girl’s favorite time of day, when the stores were still closed and the few people walking along the sidewalk all had places to be—women with plastic flowers in their hats, men in fancy bellhop uniforms. The folks the girl liked best were those who stopped to buy the potatoes Granny roasted in a foil tent on her kerosene stove. Sometimes they would chat with Granny while they ate their breakfast, and the girl would bask in their voices, though she paid no attention to the meanings of words, didn’t care at all what grown folks had to say to each other, whether it was a conversation held over a roasted sweet potato or over her own sick body, which by the time she became aware of it again had been moved from the wooden folding chair in the waiting room to a
gurney in a hallway. A doctor in gold-rimmed glasses poked and probed at the girl while Granny stood to the side, arms folded and that look on her face suggesting she was getting ready to give the spectacled man a good licking. To spare him, the girl managed to rasp, “I don’t need nothing,” though at first the words stuck in her parched throat, so she said it again, provoking the man to laughter.
“You need plenty!” he said, which made the girl think he knew something about her that Granny didn’t. She closed her eyes and returned in her mind to her grandmother’s cart and the buttery lips of strangers shining in the morning light.
She woke in a different bed, found herself lying between crisp white sheets, and though her jaw was stiff and her throat ached, her teeth weren’t chattering anymore. She was just a little too warm instead of unbearably cold, a preferable sensation, since it made her feel as if she were tucked against Mama’s sleeping body in their shared bed. Granny stood in the same stern position, and when she saw that the child was awake she launched into an account of the tribulations caused by the girl’s sickness. “You be acting like the Queen of Sheba the way you go on...” The girl just stared at the dirty white wall and thought about how much better she felt, listening again only when Granny started telling how that baby in the waiting room had died in its mama’s arms without ever having been examined by a doctor, and you can be sure Granny wasn’t going to let the same happen to her own kin.
The girl left the hospital the next morning, still too weak to walk, so Granny pushed her in the cart. She perched in front like a figurehead nailed to an old fishing rig, smiling at people who smiled at her as she rolled past. Back home, Granny put her to bed, and the girl spent the rest of the week recuperating, dozing during the day while Granny was away and tossing and turning through the night, unable to sleep soundly without her mama snoring beside her. Finally the girl couldn’t stand lying there any longer, and she got up in the darkness and dressed herself. When Granny woke to see the girl waiting in her polka-dot dress with frayed batting and torn hem, she gave her a good scolding because it was Sunday, and on Sunday little girls should beautify themselves for the Lord. So the girl changed into her one fine dress, a frilly pink confection, and they set off together for the Metropolitan Baptist Church.
From then on, everything seemed to fall into place. The only piece missing was Mama, and after a few weeks the child stopped expecting her to come home. At the end of that boiler-room summer the landlord raised the rent five dollars, and Granny decided to move. She packed their suitcases and paid two boys a nickel each to carry the mattresses and load their belongings on her cart. The girl filled a paper bag with her few valuables—a box of seashells she’d scavenged from rubbish on the street, her dresses, and a charm necklace her mother had given her last year. By the afternoon they were settled in their new apartment on 134th Street, just a half block up from the river, so if the girl woke early enough she could watch from the rooftop as the sun turned the strip of water brick red. The apartment was even smaller than the last, but the girl didn’t mind, especially since they had a toilet of their own, a toilet that flushed! They lived on the first floor, and if a truck happened to be rumbling by on the street, the girl wouldn’t be able to hear what her granny was saying. So Granny would just raise her voice and say something like, “When you going to stop pretending you the Queen of Sheba?”—Granny’s favorite admonishment ever since the girl had been brazen enough to require hospital care. Eventually, after months of supposedly putting on airs, the girl found the title had stuck, and her granny called her Queen Sheebie if she called her anything at all. In no time her schoolmates took to using the name, flinging it at her first in fun and then with indifference, so she stopped fidgeting when she heard it and started turning into Queen Sheebie until, from her point of view, the name seemed more than suitable.
Not that the child had any sort of queenly shine to her. Her coffee skin was splotched with freckles, and her eyes usually had a startled gleam to them, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d seen. Truth was, she believed too much. She believed that sinners spend eternity tied to a roasting spit over a huge bonfire; she believed her mother was a sinner, just as Granny said; she believed that when she grew up she’d have her own huckster cart and sell sweet potatoes and popcorn along Lenox Avenue; she also believed that the angels were waiting for her granny, tapping their silver slippers expectantly, though Granny never said as much and instead kept on like a mechanical soldier march, march, marching across a toy-shop floor. But the old woman had a way of moaning in her sleep that made her sound like she was saying good-bye to life. The girl didn’t think far enough ahead to worry about who would take care of her when Granny died—she wondered only about that strange moment when Granny would drift from her bed up to heaven, imagined that the angels would hover outside the window blowing trumpets while the neighbors came running. The girl only hoped she’d reach the rooftop in time to see her grandmother slip through the gilded door at the crest of the sky.
But the old woman, with typical stubbornness, wasn’t ready to die. And while the simple effort of rising from her chair and walking over to the toilet would make her pant, she never complained about her ailments. She complained about Queen Sheebie plenty, of course, blamed her for the high-and-mighty attitude she must have learned from her mama. The harangues grew worse when the girl took to heading after school to the 135th Street branch library. But even then Granny never beat her and never said, I don’t want you going to that place no more. So the girl, who hated winter ever since her fever had taught her the truth about cold, bided time in the library reading room while Granny wrapped herself in old shawls and tended her cart, the slush and snow apparently bothering her not a bit.
The girl liked nothing better than to page through books looking at the pictures, and one afternoon she was doing just this when a white-haired man pulled up a chair beside her. She felt him staring and was about to move to another seat when he pointed to the word at the top of the page and said, “Read this.”
“What?”
“Tell me what it says.”
She could read a few words, and that’s what she usually did in the library—searched books for familiar words like cat and the and Jesus. But the word at the top of the page was just a jumble of letters. She couldn’t even make sense of the book’s title, though she had selected it herself from the shelf. So she clamped her mouth shut, and the man with the dust-mop hair began to read: “‘Introduction...The subject and method of this book...’” and then he stopped, skipped forward a few pages, and began again: “‘Chapter one. My African Expedition,’” his voice beginning to please the girl, for on the cover of the book was a roaring lion, and she’d been disappointed to find that the chapters contained no pictures. With the old man reading, she could imagine the wounded animals turning to charge, the rifles raised, the hunter pinned beneath a tiger’s paw. But he wasn’t going to let her get away with dreaming her way through. “Assist me,” he whispered, nearly poking a hole through the page with his finger.
“The,” the girl said.
“The what?”
“The err-uhh.”
“Roo,” the man corrected.
“Roo,” the girl echoed.
“Rule,” he said. “Rule.”
“Rule. The rule.”
And so it began, her first reading lesson by Mr. Dosan, as he finally introduced himself. She’d long since figured out that nothing could be learned at school, not with such a din made by thousands of children packed into a too-small building. The girl, impressed by this man who obviously knew everything there was to be known, accepted Mr. Dosan’s unspoken invitation and began a course of study that occupied her right through the unkind winter months and dozens of books.
They met after school, finding each other in the library reading room as if by chance, for they never made arrangements to meet, and they worked for at least a solid hour every weekday afternoon. Thanks to her new mentor, the girl came to understand the power of
embarrassment at about the same rate that she was learning to read. Sometimes she found herself wishing he would leave her alone, though she never admitted this aloud, and instead tried her best to be a model student, which meant following his directions exactly, sounding out sentences from whatever dull book he’d chosen from the stacks. He never seemed completely satisfied with her performance, never told her what a good job she’d done, yet neither did he scold her for her mistakes. They just kept pushing on, moving farther from “the shores of ignorance,” as he grandly said one day, her dependency upon him increasing as she came to sense the vastness of this sea of words, all the unrelated information and so many different meanings that in some ways she felt more perplexed than ever and began secretly resenting Mr. Dosan for knowing as much as he did. On some afternoons she couldn’t even stand his peppermint breath, much less his instruction, and she began looking for any opportunity to lord it over the old man and force him to feel as stupid as he made her feel.
By the middle of March, she’d learned a year’s worth of phonics, according to Mr. Dosan, who offered to reward her with a sundae. They ended up in a lunchroom two blocks from the library, the same lunchroom where Mama used to work. They sat in a booth by the front window; the grimy panes were streaked with rain, and cigarette smoke turned in spirals beneath the overhead lights. The girl remembered how she would spin herself around on a stool while Mama blended her an egg cream, and she regretted that she wasn’t sitting at the counter now. She didn’t recognize the waitress who came over to take their order, but the waitress recognized the girl right away. She began clucking and shaking her head, denying vocally what she already knew: “You ain’t Sally’s girl, tell me you ain’t Sally’s girl, that itsy-bitsy thing used to come here to give her mama a hug round the knees.”
