by Dorothy West
“That means Daddy wanted us and they didn’t,” said Barby, not minding.
Lute tweaked Barby’s braids, the signal that he was through with her and ready for Tina. She and Tina shifted places, crawling over Lute like puppies.
He settled Tina between his knees. Reflectively he rubbed the back of the hairbrush along his nose, trying to figure out how to explain.
“It doesn’t mean they didn’t want you, mothers always want their babies. It means that when a mother and father get a divorce they can’t divide the baby, so they have to draw straws. I was always lucky enough to draw the long straw.”
“How many divorces did we have?” asked Tina, not sure she approved of them.
“Well, going on three,” Lute said, trying to make them sound like perfectly normal happenings.
“Three,” said Tina wonderingly. “Three divorces and three mothers.” Next door there were three children and only one mother for all of them. Somehow she liked that arrangement. She knew that she would have hated it if she and Barby and Muffin had had three fathers. It was better to have just one of each. Except that they didn’t have even one mother, for all that once there had been three. She wondered if Barby wanted a mother. Muffin never wanted anything but dolls so that she could boss them the way the housekeepers bossed her. But if Barby wanted a mother, maybe Daddy would do something about it. Daddy always said Barby had the most sense.
But Barby would never want a mother. She knew about mothers. They cried. She could not remember the face of her mother, but vividly, chillingly, she remembered the sound of her sobbing and, after her, Tina’s mother’s wilder sobbing, and now the one Daddy called Delia, who was probably Muffin’s mother, because in the night she sobbed too.
She said bluntly, before Tina could even ask, “I don’t like mothers. They make me nervous. They cry too much. They get mad too much, they call Daddy ‘nigger.’”
It was a harsh word, an ugly word, a word that no one had ever heard her say. But she had to say it for Tina’s sake. She could trust Muffin not to want a mother. But she was beginning to be doubtful of Tina, who was seeing too much of next door’s mother. Tina didn’t know what mothers were like when they were crying mad. She had been too little to remember—just as Barby had been too little to understand.
Lute said carefully, “Sometimes mothers say things when they’re mad that they’re sorry for when they’re not mad.”
But the children were not comforted. Muffin had clutched his arm while Barby was speaking, and Tina, even inside the nest of Lute’s knees, moved uneasily. They were frightened by the forbidden word. Barby had heard their mothers say it. No wonder Barby didn’t like mothers. Muffin screwed up her face in utter rejection of this species of woman. Tina tried hard to but somehow couldn’t. The image of next door’s mother intruded.
Next door’s mother never cried. Whenever she looked at Tina, she smiled. Whenever she spoke, she said words that were loving. Every day she gave Tina a hug and a kiss, sometimes more than one, sometimes more than two. Tina had spent the shining summer in breathless expectancy of this ritual.
The children next door were only oblique excuses for going over to visit. Barby was scornful of them because they were boys who pulled her braids. Muffin beat them with her fists when they dangled her dolls out of reach and made her say please. But Tina pretended that boys were fun to play with, although she was terrified if they played rough.
The way to heaven was not always easy, but getting there was worth the bumps and bruises. For next door’s mother came to comfort. She was soft and round. To lean against her felt so different from Daddy. It felt safe, as if she could sink so deep into that warm and breathing softness that she would be hidden forever from everything that frightened her.
Next door’s mother said Tina was the little girl she had always wanted until she gave up trying. It was plain that boys were not what she wanted. When she hugged them, they giggled silly and wriggled away. Tina didn’t. She stood very still, mute and malleable. Time after time Tina got an extra hug from the love left begging by the boys.
Next door’s mother had found Tina after she stopped trying. It was funny how things happened. It was wonderful how things happened. There never was a summer that had kept so many promises.
CHAPTER THREE
Muffin suddenly burst out laughing. “Look at Jezebel,” she squealed, doubling over with delight.
They looked at Jezebel. She was picking her way across the park, walking slowly and sedately, with a large, unwieldy pancake suspended from her mouth. Presently she stopped, lifted one paw, and scanned the park for spies. Then she carefully put the pancake down and dug a hole beside it.
It was her morning custom to make the round of the cottages. As the only female dog in the Oval, she could walk across lawns and scratch on screen doors without fear of being chased by the males whose province she was invading. That she was old and spayed and oblivious to their overtures did not lessen their appreciation of her presence among them. She was a diversion from their daily squabbles, and her favors, such as they were, were impartial.
Jezebel took everything that was offered her and buried everything that wasn’t a bone. What pleased her palate she ate on the premises. The rest she carried to the park. That she accepted, even begged for, what she did not want was greed. That she saved room in her stomach for what she did want was good planning.
The Coles place was her favorite and final stop. Having lost their old dog the winter before, the Coleses were partial to Jezebel. They did not give her table scraps; they gave her solid chunks of meat. Even in her own home Jezebel did not have it that good. A dog who has to live with children has to have a lot of messy leftovers mixed in with her daily rations.
Jezebel, her task completed and the earth packed back as neatly as if it had never been disturbed, now made straight tracks for the Coles place, panting in her lumbering haste.
Lute had bound Tina’s hair into braids. He tugged at them, and her face bent back to him, its innocence dream-washed with love for next door’s mother, even Jezebel’s antics not wholly erasing it.
Impaling the love on that lifted face, Lute kissed Tina so hard that her teeth caught in the flesh of her lip, and a little trickle of blood filled her throat with nausea. As she clambered over Lute’s knee to give her place to Muffin, he caught her in a bear hug that took her breath away. She gasped from the pain of it. Her ribs felt crushed.
“That hurts, Daddy,” she said on a sob.
Barby turned beet red. “Stop it, Daddy,” she said fiercely, while Muffin beat on his arm, her hand being quicker than her tongue.
“You know I wouldn’t hurt Tina,” he said, trapping Muffin’s fist and lifting her high above his head to make her laugh. “Tina knows how much I love her.”
But no one knew really. It was immeasurable. Every man has a child that is his heart’s child. For Lute it was Tina, born of his second wife, a Polack waitress, fresh from her chastity on an upcountry farm, her eye compelled to Lute’s dark handsomeness in the row of amorphous white faces across the counter of a cheap beanery.
Lute made love to her in the loft. No trick to get her there, who had nowhere to go in the big, indifferent city, and no time wasted in seducing her, since he was a master at seduction and she a trembling novice, learning more than she could bear knowing, loving Lute and hating herself.
He married her, not because he owed it to her, but to give legitimate paternity to his child that she was carrying. For all the useful obscenities at his disposal he was never known to call anybody “bastard.” And this Polack girl, to whom he had never shown tenderness, or been faithful to, or even acknowledged as his wife, once he had the paper to prove it, treating her like a servant, not even knowing how to treat a servant decently, mocking her Polack ways, never saying two words to her that did not have their roots in obscenity, this girl had called him “nigger, nigger, nigger” in a last-ditch stand against his deadlier venom, and given him the divorce he had been demanding
ever since his infidelities narrowed down to one obsession, Delia, cool and bored and Beacon Hill, as far removed from his mode of living as the remotest star.
He reached up for Delia and pulled her down, down to the level of his debauchery, and he wanted his divorce so he could marry her, whose consent to be married he had miraculously achieved, whose child, his child, without miracles, was already conceived.
Why Delia, having tried marriage once and found it wanting, found it, too, an expensive entanglement that cost her a good deal of money to buy herself custody of her son, why she would jeopardize that custody, and the happiness and psyche of the son she adored, never knowing when he would know, knowing she could not face his knowing, why, with nothing to gain and all to lose, she would let herself go so far with Lute that there was nothing ahead but disaster was because she, like the Polack, whom she was so unlike, and the wife before the Polack, whom she was even more unlike, carried within her the seed of self-destruction.
That first wife had been walking the beat, waiting for Lute, or someone like him, to pass. She was a truant from junior high, a baby-faced tramp, hot in her pants, pretty as a picture. Any boy in school would have dated her, but that quirk in her preferred bad to good, black to white. She was a Miss Know-it-all who knew no more than she had read in dirty books.
She thought her rendezvous in the loft, toward which her quick, unhesitating step carried her down the night-emptied, echoing streets, past the night-mysterious buildings, her eye darting toward doorways, not in fear but for the thrill of the unknowable, and the sound of her squeaking shoes as lost and lonely as crying children—she thought these ecstatic nights, and the liquor she drank like water, and the pawnshop presents Lute bought her, made her a bold adventuress, beginning a life of love and luxury which would end on the other side of the ocean in the gilded palace and golden bed of a turbaned prince.
But she did not count the days, for the nights alone possessed her senses. And when there was no check mark to make on the calendar, she did not know how to tell Lute she had failed him as a mistress. She never told him. He saw her swelling breasts; he heard her slower step on the attic stairs, and the moaning in her love that was more protest than pleasure.
He married her and put her in a flat in a section of the city where poor black trash and poor white trash mingled indifferently.
He was not completely sure her child was his, but he wanted no child that was his to be born a bastard, and he took the chance, coldly preparing, though he had no plan, to kill both mother and child if the child showed no trace of being colored.
And the girl, no more wanting to be married than Lute because marriage was an act of morality, repeated the vows of chastity and obedience out of hatred for her misshapen body that made her think that since she was ruined for love forever it did not matter if she wore a wedding ring and pushed a baby buggy.
When her child was born, she could not forgive it for staying alive. When her body heated and her blood ran hot again, she could not bear the baby’s helplessness that bound her to its needs.
Lute tried to beat her into wanting her baby, and her outcries were love cries that goaded him into greater brutish-ness. He never saw her fondle the child, or talk to it, or respond to its needs without sullenness.
When he came home, he examined the baby, felt her stomach to see if it was full, felt her diaper to see if it was dry, buried his nose somewhere in her middle for the smell of her, clean or foul. And however it was with the child, howling in hunger or cooing in content, his hand left a welt on his wife, and he scorned her in the night, wanting no woman who did not want children, who made him remember that he had no memories of mother love.
They lived in their hell for three years, she taking whatever spillover of sex she could get from whatever delivery man came to her door and had inclination and time for it, Lute keeping no count, losing count, of the women he laid in the loft, women from the street on whom he practiced a savage carnality as if each wore the face of his mother, that face of which he did not know one line.
The day that he found his child alone—not that she had never been left alone, but that he had never found her alone, the child being so used to it that she had never prattled over it—he snatched her up and took her to a neighbor’s, someone he knew by sight and thought an ugly, big, fat, greasy sight, but likely enough to be a stay-at-home, and have no man but the man she was married to, an ugly, colored woman he could trust with his child, while he went home to kill his white wife.
He went home and waited, and in the hours of waiting, with only his hands to kill with, and those hands not really made for killing, he decided it was sweeter revenge to kick the mother bitch out to sell what was worth nothing to him, to starve when it was worth nothing to anyone, and to die slowly and lingeringly, unknown and unwept in the way he hoped God had punished his mother.
She died without disease or drawn-out suffering or hunger in a back alley in Chinatown, looking like a lost child who would lie down anywhere to sleep or, if not found, to die. She had a room to go to, and a Chinaman waiting with love in his loins, but she had been too drunk to get from one bed to another, and too beset by fate to escape her destiny.
Lute buried her, because it was easy for the police to retrace her history from yellow man to black. The big, fat, ugly woman knew a widow woman, as plug-ugly and no-nonsense as herself, who became the first of Lute’s housekeepers before he realized that a housekeeper did not have to be repulsive and could be good in bed for no additional money.
Between the loft and the housekeeper’s bed there was no lack in Lute that made him desire the awkward innocence of the Polack, who never excited or satisfied him, unless there was in him some deep-rooted compulsion to father children who knew their father.
Now there was Muffin’s mother, Delia, wife number three, secret wife number three, and God knows, secret and still astounded mother, who had bought a piece of Lute’s furniture, and then bought Lute by opening the doors of her friends to him.
He had waited outside those doors, hitching his shoulders, while a servant went to see if he was expected to use the front entrance. When that servant returned, Lute followed him into a morning room, where often Delia had preceded him, deliberately, to enjoy his discomfiture at finding her there among her friends, who were not his friends, and never would be, talking past him, around him, and certainly over him, treating him as if he were part of his own furniture, her eyes never meeting his in communication.
The Polack felt the senseless blows he did not dare inflict on Delia, stomached the swilling over of his frustration, and when she could bear no more, when to crawl back on her hands and knees to her own kind and kin and live with their scorn forever was better than being devoured alive, she gave Lute the divorce he had beaten out of her, and the child he had never let be hers, clutching to her uncomforted heart the worthless knowledge that his triumphs were too hard won to bring him any happiness.
Lute, loving best the gentle child of that gentle girl he had never even tried to love, his blood made water by Tina’s tears, whose mother’s tears had turned his blood to ice, was determined that Tina should have the best he could give her, whatever the cost to himself or anyone else.
In this small rented house of Addie Bannister’s that could fit twice inside Lute’s big house in Boston, where every stick of furniture was of his own design, while Addie Bannister’s beds and chairs were, like their owner, on their last legs, Tina had been happier than Lute had ever seen her.
She loved the maternal eye of the Oval, where all the children were partly owned by all the watchful mothers, not knowing she played in the park on sufferance, or that her summer was almost over.
For Lute, Tina’s summers in the Oval had just begun. No one would take away her joy in belonging. He had tried to fight for it clean. Now he would fight for it dirty. When the battle lines were drawn, he would have settled for a seat at the wedding, asking no more than this guarantee of his right to return to the Oval. But the Cole
ses had thought too much of a lousy invitation to write his name across it. They had forced the fight. Now he would settle for no less than the best they had to offer.
The gossip tossed back and forth on the beach buried Addie Bannister before the first snow. Yet with all his cash, and all his credit, he couldn’t buy her dollhouse for Tina. The God-almighty Coleses would see to that with a quiet word to the bluenose Boston lawyer who handled her meager affairs.
Well, he didn’t want this dollhouse. They knew what they could do with it. Next summer, and every summer until hell caught up with him, he would pull off his pants in the Goddamn cottage of the Coleses and sleep in the bed of their prize daughter.
Shelby was ripe for the reaching. He knew the signs of surrender. What did a white man have for her that he didn’t have a hundred times over? He needed no more than an hour alone with her to break the crystal he could see through so clearly. There wasn’t a woman he couldn’t bring to her knees, begging for more, denying him nothing, not even her hand in marriage.
His children would dance at his wedding a whole lot sooner than these Ovalites would dance at the wedding they had printed tickets for.
He turned his look of triumph on Tina. “Who wants to come back here next summer?” he crowed, laughter crinkling his eyes at the expected answer.
“I do, I do, I do,” all the little girls sang, their behinds bumping up and down in their eagerness.
Lute creased his brows. “But suppose we can’t rent this house again? Suppose we can’t rent a house at all?”
“Oh, what will we do?” they cried passionately.
“Let me think,” Lute teased them. He thought profoundly, the little girls staring at him and hardly breathing. After a long moment his face brightened. He nodded in satisfaction, swiveled Muffin’s head from front to back, and began to braid her shining hair. It was still too short to stay in braids much longer than it took to make them, but her feelings would have been outraged if he had not gone through the motions.
