by Ann Petry
Link looked toward the screen door. “Is that a record?”
Abbie hesitated, wishing she could bring herself to say, Yes, it’s a record, a blues or a boogiewoogie or a jazz record or whatever they called the bleating that issued from all the gramophones and radios these days, all of it sounding alike, too loud, too harsh, no sweetness, no tune, simply a reiterated bleating about rent money and men who had gone off with other women, and numbers that didn’t come out. It was perfectly ridiculous, she knew it, admitted it, but she did not want Link to see Mamie Powther. Sooner or later he was bound to. The Powthers had been living upstairs for two days now but it was usually noon before her voice came drifting down from an upstairs window.
“No,” she said reluctantly. “That’s not a record. That’s Mrs. Powther, the new tenant.”
He went to the back door and stood there so long, motionless, watching something, that Abbie got up from the table to look, too.
Mamie Powther was hanging up clothes in the backyard. Abbie frowned. She’ll have to get her own line or I won’t have any place to hang my things. She must have got up very early to turn out such a tremendous wash. Very clean clothes they were, too. A big clothes basket heaped to the top stood on the grass under the line. There was an almost hypnotic rhythm about her movements, Abbie found that she, too, couldn’t look away. Bend over and pick up shirt, straighten up, and shake it out, reach for clothespins, straighten up, pin shirt on line, bend over.
Big John’s got a brandnew gal
High yaller wench name of Sal
And I’m lonesome—lonesome.
She keeps changing the words, Abbie thought, listening, and watching. Wind whipped the clothes back and forth, lifting the hem of Mamie Powther’s short cotton dress as though it peered underneath and liked what it saw and so returned again and again for another look. What a vulgar idea. I never think things like that. It’s that getup she has on. A sleeveless dress, printed material, white background with big red poppies all over it. A bright red scarf wound around her head. And there among the sheets, the pillowcases, the towels, the children’s socks and underwear and overalls, her figure stood out—a gaudy, bigbosomed young woman with sturdy arms, dimpled at the elbows. When she bent over you could see that she had no stockings on, you could see the back of her thighs, more than halfway up, just as though she were leaning over in a bathing suit. The bending over effortless, the straightening up, all in one smooth unbroken motion, the wind whipping the clothes, lifting them, returning them to her, and she singing in time to all this movement:
Trouble sits at my front door
Can’t shut him out any more
And I’m lonesome—lonesome.
Watching her, you could almost believe it was a dance of some kind, the dance of the clothes, the wetwash dance. I don’t dance. I never could, Abbie thought. I haven’t any sense of rhythm and yet she hangs clothes and I think about dancing. I don’t believe she’s got a thing on under that dress.
When Link turned away from the door, Abbie waited for him to say something funny about the red poppies on the dress, or about the soft brown flesh so very exposed to view.
But all he said was, “My! my! my! So that’s Mrs. Powther.”
He drank the rest of his coffee standing up, then he leaned down, patted Abbie’s cheek and kissed her, straightened up, said softly, “The female fruit fly,” and laughed.
For a barely perceptible second there was a break in the rhythm of Mamie Powther’s song and Abbie knew that she’d heard that powerful male laughter coming from the first floor. Heard it and probably made a note of it for future reference.
Then he was gone. Whistling. Whistling the tailend of the same tune: I’m lonesome—lonesome.
Somehow she would have to get rid of that big young woman, still hanging up clothes, pausing now and then to look straight up at the sky. Blowzy. No. Gaudy. Well, yes. She simply did not belong in that neat backyard with its carefully tended lawn and its white fences. The brilliant red of the poppies on her dress made the red of the dogwood leaves look faded, washed out. She did not match the yard or the kind of morning that it was. Sunny. Fairly warm. Winter still far away but coming, the potential there, in the east wind, but the grass still green. She dominated the morning so that you saw nothing but Mamie, heard nothing but Mamie, and with a little concentration, it was possible to believe that you could smell nothing but Mamie—that sweet heavy perfume was definitely in the air. Brassy. That was the word. Mamie Powther was like a trumpet call sent out over the delicate nuances and shadings of stringed instruments played softly, making you jump, startled, because it didn’t belong there.
“I’m lonesome—lonesome—”
Mamie Powther. Why not Mrs. Powther. Somehow natural to eliminate Mrs. Not a man’s wife, permanently attached, but an unattached unwifely female. She didn’t belong in the backyard any more than her furniture belonged in Number Six Dumble Street. Such furniture! Lamps with pink rayon shades, and a bed with the headboard and footboard covered with cupids and grapes and grape leaves, a big chest of drawers almost like a highboy, with the same appalling cupids on the handles of the drawers. The packing hadn’t been done properly, or rather, Mamie Powther hadn’t made any effort to pack at all. There were a thousand-and-one loose items that had to be carried upstairs in piles. Clothing and pots and pans and nursing bottles. There was a battered highchair with food particles stuck on it and a child’s pot made of pink plastic. That, too, somehow characteristic of the woman. And toys, she hadn’t even tried to get hold of any cartons—legless dolls and broken fire engines and trucks without wheels, and scooters without steering gear were carried up in piles—and she wasn’t certain but there seemed to be a great wudge of what looked like soiled diapers, but surely none of those children could be still wearing diapers.
There were two moving-men on the truck—one was big and one was little but their voices were the same size. It took both of them to get some of the furniture up the stairs. The house was filled with their shouts, “On me!” “On you!” Only they made it sound like “Awn me!” “Awn you!” To see what they were doing Abbie had gone to the front of the house. The little one stepped back bracing his body for the weight of a tremendous sofa upholstered in pale blue brocade, shouting “Awn me!” Though the other man was not two feet away from him, he shouted back, “Awn you!” Then when they reached the landing, the big man braced himself shouting “Awn me!” “Awn me!” “Awn you!” and then the children took it up, loving the sound of it, and she could detect no difference in the loudness of Shapiro’s voice or Kelly’s voice.
As soon as she finished doing the breakfast dishes she would tell Mrs. Powther about the clothesline. She heard a soft drumming sound that came from the front of the house. She listened. What could that be? A muffled drumming, not a banging but a drumming sound.
As she went toward the hall, walking briskly, she thought, I’ve been afraid of everything, ever since the Major died. No one has ever known how afraid I’ve been. Any unexpected sound makes my heart beat faster, makes me catch my breath.
J.C. was sitting on the stairs, two steps up, drumming his heels against the riser of the lower step. The sound of his heels striking against the stair carpet made a soft, regular rhythmic sound. Inherited sense of rhythm, she thought. Inherited from Mamie. It didn’t seem possible but he was drinking from a nursing bottle. As she approached he took his hands away from the bottle, holding it in his mouth with his teeth, so that it swung back and forth, and he began to rock his body back and forth too. He was staring at the Major’s silk hat and at the goldheaded cane—the hat still on the coatrack in the hall, the cane hanging there beside it.
He looked at Abbie briefly, and then his gaze returned to the hat. Again she got the feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.
He transferred his hands to the bottle, drank from it, gave a little wiggle of pleasure, then, twisting one arm through th
e balustrades, he half lay down on the stairs. He placed the bottle on the step beside him.
“Crunch,” he said, “what’s that?” He lisped and it sounded as though he said, “Crunth—whathethat?”
It was perfectly obvious that he was talking about the Major’s hat and the cane, because he kept his unwinking gaze focused on them.
“You call me Mrs. Crunch, young man.”
“Missus Crunch,” he said, giving her a look so adult and so malevolent that she wanted to shake him. “What’s that?”
“A silk hat and a goldheaded cane.”
“What’s a goldheaded cane?”
This could go on forever. If she answered him or tried to, he’d think up a hundred other questions on the basis of her reply.
“You ask your mother and she’ll tell you.”
“What’s a goldheaded cane?” he repeated.
“You ask your mother and she’ll tell you,” she said again as imperturbably as though he had asked the question for the first time. Then she said abruptly, “What’s a big boy like you doing drinking out of a bottle?”
“Drinking milk.”
She glanced at him sharply. He hardly seemed old enough for such expert evasion. Four-year-olds didn’t usually—Or was he?
“How old are you?”
“Three and a half.” He didn’t look at her, he was staring up at the hat, at the cane.
“Well, you’re old enough to be drinking milk from a glass.”
“Me don’t like it that way.”
“Say I don’t like it that way. Not ‘me.’”
“I don’t like it that way,” he said obediently, still not looking at her.
That was fairly simple, she thought. It’s just a matter of being firm with them. He had a comic book thrust in the front of his shirt and she started to ask him about it, he certainly couldn’t read and she didn’t see why he should be so fond of comic books, some one must have spoiled his taste already, and perhaps— But she never got around to the comic book because she heard a faint hissing noise, a kind of h-stt. J.C. was looking at her very gravely and she turned away. Something must have gone wrong with the radiator in Link’s room. As she turned she glanced down at the floor, at the polished parquet floor. Those beautiful floors were partly responsible for her insistence on buying this house even though the Major disapproved. There was a little puddle of water there and as she looked it grew larger. She stared at the little boy sprawled there on the stairs, dismayed. Why he isn’t trained yet, three and a half years old and he isn’t trained. My stair carpet, my floor, and there will be a smell of urine in the front hall just like in the tenements—
“You listen to me,” she said angrily. “There are some things I simply will not put up with. And this is one of them. You can tell that mother of yours that I said so.”
He didn’t reply, just looked at her with that same grave air. “Did you hear what I said?” She laid her hand on his arm.
He flung the hand away, got up, and scuttled up the stairs. When he reached the landing he stopped, peered down at her, shouted, “Jaybird, jaybird, sittin’ in the grath, draw back, draw back, shoot him in the—YAH! Crunth—Crunth—Crunth!”
She made a motion as though she were going to pursue him and he stuck his tongue out and then scrambled up the stairs, moving fast, his feet thumping on the steps.
Mopping up the puddle he’d made, she kept thinking, Maybe he isn’t quite bright, three and a half years old and he was still using a nursing bottle, still wetting himself, but his eyes were highly intelligent, almost too much so, and he was inquisitive, always asking questions, just as any normal child should. He’d left the bottle of milk on the stairs. Well, she’d put it in the garbage can and then she’d tell Mamie Powther about the clothesline and tell her, also, to keep J.C. off the front stairs.
Outside in the backyard she walked toward Mamie Powther’s bentover figure, thinking, I’ll start off by saying, “About the clothesline—”
But she didn’t say anything because she heard a man’s voice saying, “Hi, Mamie, what’s the pitch?”
There, on the other side of the clothesline stood Bill Hod.
Mamie Powther said, “Lord, babe, you sure gave me a turn. I didn’t hear you come in the yard. How are you anyway?” She laughed. It was a warm joyous sound. “Come on up and see the place. It’s a mess but I can give you a cup of coffee.”
I won’t have it, Abbie thought. I won’t have him in my yard.
Mamie turned toward the house, “Oh! Good mornin’, Missus Crunch. I didn’t see you,” she said, smiling, showing her white, strong teeth. “Meet my cousin, Mr. Bill Hod.”
In the kitchen, Abbie sat down heavily on the nearest chair, sat there shaking as though she’d had a chill, thinking, The house, the Major, Dumble Street. In that order. He had disapproved of her choice of a house, not so much the house, though it was big, neglected, had been vacant for years and so repairs would be expensive, not the house, but its location. Near the river. Near the dock. He said rivers and waterfronts were not good places to live. But it was a brick house and Abbie had always wanted a brick house and the price was very low so they bought it.
It was almost twenty years ago that it happened. All of that. Yet the sight of Bill Hod in my yard makes me keep shivering as though it were yesterday. It was on a Saturday afternoon in August. The Hangman was in full leaf. She had gone out to select a handful of especially beautiful leaves to show to her Sunday School class in the morning. She happened to look down the street, down toward Franklin Avenue, and she saw the Major, lurching along, leaning on Bill Hod. Sometimes he stopped and waved both arms in the air, and then gestured vaguely, using the goldheaded cane to accent his gestures, sometimes he dragged it along the sidewalk, then held it straight up in the air.
Inside the house, she waited for them, watching from the window. As they approached the steps, she opened the front door.
“He’s sick,” Bill Hod said.
She’d seen them before, these “sick” men, pushed and pulled toward home by loyal embarrassed friends. Mrs. O’Leary’s husband was always “sick” on Saturday nights and all day Sunday—or so the children said.
“I can see that,” she said coldly. She’d seen the stumbling, uncertain gait, the unfocused bleary eyes of the drunken bums who slept in doorways, lurched across the dock, stumbled out from under the sheltering branches of The Hangman, too often not to recognize this type of sickness. The Major smelt of whiskey, not just smelt of it, it was all about him, as though he had taken a bath in it.
“Put him in a chair—” She pointed toward the door of the parlor, hurriedly spread newspapers all around the chair, thinking, My carpet, my beautiful new carpet—
“He should be in bed—”
The Major said something or tried to. It was only a blurred muttering in his throat, a horrible drunken sound, suggesting that even the muscles of his throat were drunk.
She turned on Bill Hod. Oh, she knew him. She had tried to prevent his getting a liquor license for that place he ran right across the street.
“Get out of my house—”
Bill Hod said, “He’s a sick man. You better get a doctor.”
The Major made that horrible drunken muttering in his throat again and the smell of what she always called cheap whiskey seemed to be everywhere in the room. She thought, I can’t stand that smell; if I don’t get out of here quickly, I will be sick. Bill Hod hadn’t moved; he was looking at her, staring at her, defying her.
She picked up a poker from the fireplace, a very old handwrought poker, black, crudelooking, handed down in her family from one generation to the next, and even as she picked it up, felt the coldness of the metal, the roughness of it, the weight of it, she thought, Has it ever been used as a weapon before?
She said, “Will you get out of here or will I have to call a policeman?”
The poker slid out of her hand, clattered on the hearth. She thought Bill Hod was going to strike her, no, not strike her, his eyes, his voice, she’d never heard such fury in a human voice, she thought he was going to kill her. Strangle her with his hands. He took a step forward, and his eyes were cold, absolutely inhuman. The eyes of a hangman. Face of a hangman.
He said, “You fool—you goddamn fool—get a doctor—” And he was gone.
She went into the kitchen, sat down at the table. She couldn’t seem to think straight. She would have Hod arrested. She kept hearing the Major’s breathing, labored, stentorian, like a snore. Drunk. Drunk as a lord. What could have come over him? People would laugh at her. President of the local WCTU and her husband so drunk he couldn’t stand up. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha. The colored president of the white WCTU. A drunken husband. Well, he’s colored. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha.
Six o’clock. Suppertime. And he still sounded exactly the same. Link kept tiptoeing in to look at him, coming back to the kitchen, face frightened, eyes frightened, but too fascinated to pay any attention to her repeated warnings to stay out of the parlor.
She had forgotten that she had invited Frances to have supper with them. Link must have been waiting in the hall, waiting for the sound of the knocker, so that he could get to the door first and let Frances in. Frances came straight back to the kitchen and before she could get her hat off, Link said, “Uncle Theodore’s sick. He’s in the parlor and he’s got newspapers all around him on the floor.”
So, of course, Frances went into the parlor to find out how he was, and Abbie went, too. Frances listened to his breathing, stopped just inside the door to listen, and then crossed the room quickly, bent over him, frowning, feeling his pulse, forcing his eyelids open, and the newspapers made a rustling sound under her feet as she moved around him.
When Frances spoke her voice was brusquer than Abbie had ever heard it, and her eyeglasses seemed to have an added glitter. She said, “He’s seriously ill, Abbie. Mortally ill. I think he’s had a stroke. I’ll get a doctor—”
