Mrs. Anderson was looking worried. “Please, Max, don’t get all—”
“Hell, I’m not worked up,” and Max’s voice from being shrill and hard was low, almost a whisper as she looked at the gospel woman. “I gotta hate, see. Them Catholics killed my baby.” She sprang up so hastily her chair tipped backward. She jerked it upright, crying to it as if it had been human: “Damn yu, yu God-damned chair. I hate loose chairs, allatime falling down.” She looked at the gospel woman, “But Victor, he would have a house for th kid, he said. Then he helped um kill her. She was three months old day before yesterday, and three days old when they killed her.” She whirled, caught up one of the booklets. “Yu don’t think this—a million a these, a million Bibles, Jesus Christ hisself—can make me stop hating um. It wouldn’t be doing right by her if I stopped—see?”
“Max, please,” Mrs. Anderson said in a worried, pitying voice, “they didn’t kill your baby. It was weak—very weak. They didn’t tell you at first—but I talked to Victor when it was about a day old. He was badly worried, for they had it in oxygen, and …”
Max was crying in a shrill voice that held no tears: “They did kill it. Victor wanted a boy was why he seemed worried to you. Victor’s mother wanted it to die. She called it a bastard, and me married more’n a year. She’d seen our marriage certificate made out in Pittsburgh.”
“But the baby was weakly, Max,” Mrs. Anderson insisted.
“How inu hell do yu know so much?” She shook her head emphatically. “She wasn’t weakly. She had u strong cry. She was fine an strong till they carried her away. At his mother’s own church it hadda be, not inu hospital chapel—to be baptized—sneaked her off. I didn’t know till his mother told me. She knowed enough English to say that, to come bragging to me, ‘Da child’s no bastard now,’ she says. Two days later it was dead—pneumonia. They lied to me; not strong at birth, they said. They oughta told th truth—Victor an his mom, they’d rather have a dead Catholic than a live, free kid.”
She turned to Gertie as if for support, begging her to bear some of the burden of the hatred, “She was strong. I took care a myself, good. I never touched a drop a liquor, and only ten cigarettes a day—but the Catholics, the damned, damned Cath—”
“My dear, my dear,” the gospel woman interrupted, “can’t you see you’ve let them ruin your young life with hatred. Their few drops of water didn’t kill your baby or change it in any way. Many are kind people with much love.”
“Yeah? Yu think they hang together on account a their love—their hate fer niggers an Jews an Russians an Protestants holds um together.” She gave the well kept hands, the gently waving hair, a quick, contemptuous glance. “Wotta you know about hate?”
The gospel woman considered, staring down into her empty cup, and Mrs. Anderson turned to Max and began an explanation, quick-spoken and somehow dreary, as if she had already said the same thing to her many times, of how the baby must have been puny from the beginning or they wouldn’t have baptized it so soon, for usually they waited.
Max whirled from an absent-minded arranging of the gospel woman’s books left by the sink. “I’ve toldcha a million times they couldn’t wait. They knowed that once I was home with her I’d never let um take her away. I was flat on my back.” Some word or title on the cover of a booklet caught her eye. She stopped to study it an instant, and when she spoke again her voice was more calm. “I wanta buy about a dozen a these. I’ll put um all over th place, this about Catholics. One I’ll lay at th feet u his blessed Virgin.”
The gospel woman sighed. “My dear, these tracts were never meant to be distributed in such a spirit of—”
“Hate. Sure I hate him. He knows it. He cheated on me when he begged me into marrying him in Pittsburgh. There, he made me think he was a man. He ain’t no man, not here in Detroit. He’s his religion an his job an his mom’s boy. He’s got a good Polock mom. She never let her kids go to public school or hear anybody talk English at home. He got away from her for th first time in his life, and learned he hadda have a woman. So he picked me.” She stood, hands on hips, looking down at the gospel woman. “And they call it love. Love.”
“Everything has to have a name,” the gospel woman said. “Try not to take it all so hard. You are very young, but some day you will—well, grow up, get more confidence in yourself so that you will quit being afraid.”
“Afraid? Victor’s not gonna hurt me, none. He wouldn’t.”
The older woman finished her coffee, turned about in her chair, and considered Max with a little headshake. “Oh, I don’t mean he would beat you or anything like that. If he did it might be easier. You could then, perhaps, make him hate himself for having done such a thing. But don’t you think,” she went on, speaking slowly, carefully, “that—well, at least sometimes, we are more afraid of what people might make us want to do ourselves, to change ourselves—that is, when we can see through them enough to know. Some of us are more afraid of that than anything they could possibly do to us.”
Max pondered an instant, her gum still, then nodded. “Yu said it, sister. Damned if I’m gonna let anybody make me wanta be nothen but another piece a Hamtramck.”
“But you’re very much afraid you’ll start wanting to please, that’s why you hate. You’ll have to learn at least to cover it all up, so that they won’t know and be, well, shall we say, tempted?”
“But how inu hell do you cover up somethen that’s burnen a hole inyu?”
The gospel woman looked politely impatient. “Just make up your mind. Be certain. Hatred, my dear, is an emotion. Usually we hate things or people with which we have some emotional involvement, such as—”
“Love?” Max whispered, when the other seemed to hesitate and hold back from the word. She nodded, and Max came very close to her chair, and looked down into her face, asking, “But wotta yu gonna do?”
“Some manage one way. Some another. I have decided that Amnon’s way was best after all. Remember, ‘Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone.’ A woman would have to manage differently.”
“It ain’t that simple,” Max said, turning away.
“It’s all a case of making up one’s mind,” the gospel woman said.
“An when we’ve changed an tried to please em, we hate em worse than ever.” Gertie had spoken in a low voice, startled by her words, wondering why she talked. But here it wasn’t like back home. Talking to this woman was like singing to the wind. She would be gone, and what a body said to her was finished, not like talk to Sue Annie back home. There the words, always living, remembered, could be repeated twenty years later.
The gospel woman looked at her with interest, and seemed ready to say something, but at that moment Max happened to glance at the clock. “Lordy, Lordy,” she exclaimed, turning toward the bathroom, “I gotta go to Zadkiewicz’s. I gotta find some soap powder a some kind.” She glanced at Gertie. “Couldja git anything, or didn’tcha git nothen but th ‘nah’?”
Gertie smiled. The memory of her failure in the store hurt less now. Even the only half whispered jeer of “heel-beely,” of a fat woman in a yellow scarf and a red coat, stung less. The woman, like many others, had watched while Gertie stood sweaty handed and dumb, pointing to this and that in the meat counter where the strange piles of sliced stuff seemed no kin to the hogs and calves and muttons she’d butchered back home. Worse, she had been unable to understand any word of what the man behind the counter said; angry and impatient he had seemed because he couldn’t understand her. Suddenly, looking at the women around her here in Max’s kitchen, it seemed almost funny. “I did see him hand out some washen powders an soap—that good yaller napthie kind—but when it come to me I got th ‘Nah,’” and smiling more widely she flung out her hands as Zadkiewicz had done to show their emptiness.
“Yu gotta learn him,” Max said. “Him an his ‘Nahs.’ I gotta buy soap. He’s gonna sell me s
oap,” and she hurried away to dress.
“I’d like to watch and listen,” Mrs. Anderson said. “He will never sell me anything that’s scarce.”
“An take notes for Homer?” Max called over her shoulder.
Mrs. Anderson flushed, Sophronie smiled, and though the gospel woman looked at her, plainly curious, Mrs. Anderson said nothing. They were silent until Mrs. Anderson whispered under the sound of water running in the bathroom: “Max, poor thing, has such a fixation. I’ve tried to tell her that 3 percent of all babies are stillborn, and that in spite of modern medicine a great many die shortly after birth.”
“Have you ever lost a child?” the gospel woman asked.
Mrs. Anderson looked surprised and shook her head, and continued silent, staring at Gertie’s block of wood until Max came back, dressed for the street in boots, blue jeans, and jacket. “Good luck,” the gospel woman said.
“You need u luck,” Max said, opening her purse and taking out a five-dollar bill. She shoved it across the table toward the other. “I ain’t quite certain just what is your racket, lady, but whatever it is I bet you’re out for something better’n a fast buck. Take it,” she insisted when the other looked at her but did not reach for the money. “I had a houseful a drunks last night. Tips was good, but so was th pinches. Oh, them judges.”
“Thanks,” the gospel woman said, and straightened the hem of Max’s tightly belted jacket. “Poor judges,” she said, “if I were a man I know I’d whistle when I saw you.”
Max jerked off the jacket belt and flung it on the table. “If I could quit looken like a female, maybe they wouldn’t try to go no further than whistlen. Allatime they’re tryen to git me in cars, or crowden up on u street cars, an then, at work, th pinches. Detroit is th woman-hungriest place I’ve ever seen.”
Sophronie sighed. “Ain’t it th truth? They must be short a women in this town. On this shift I allus run out in the middle a th street, ever step a th way frum th bus, scrawny as I am. I’d ruther take a chanct on bein’ knocked down by a car than took by a man—”
Max, her hand on the doorknob, was interrupting. “Kathy Daly’s gonna have another fit. They’s a nigger woman inu alley. Acts like she’s lost.”
The gospel woman sprang up, uneasily asking, “Is she quite tall, slender, coffee-colored?”
“Yeah, lotta cream inu coffee, though. And she looks like something that don’t belong in this alley—a lady. Yu want I should run tell her you’re here.”
“Please,” the gospel woman said, after one glance through the door. “It’s Johala.” She considered, for an instant, her dampened clothing on the gas pipe. Then, like a child, ordinarily good and so unwilling to be caught in some meanness, she gathered everything in one swoop and hurried to the bathroom.
Max, who had run down the steps and called to the woman in the alley, opened the door, holding it wide as she said: “Go right in an make yourself at home. She’s okay. Hadda little accident. I gotta go, but I’ll be right back.”
In spite of Max’s welcome and Mrs. Anderson’s murmured, “Come in,” the tall, straight, only slightly dusky woman hesitated in the doorway. She did not seem afraid, more like one who has learned that the entering of a strange door is not always a pleasant thing. Her large eyes went quickly over the women’s faces, searched swiftly about the kitchen until she saw on the sink shelf by the door the gospel woman’s purse. Like the tracts stacked close by, it showed traces of Kathy’s scrub water. The woman gave a low, troubled gasp.
“Is she hurt?”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Her clothing got wetted, that’s all.”
Sophronie smiled and flicked on Max’s coffee-making machine. “She’s inu bathroom changing back into her clothes. Run an see about her if yu wanta, then set an have some coffee. I’ll bet you’ve been a looken around these alleys in this weather fer a spell.”
“Not long,” the woman said, smiling at Sophronie. All the suspicion was gone from her face now, though she hurried a little as she went to the bathroom.
Any talk she and the gospel woman might have had was blotted out by an unusually low-flying airplane. The place was so filled with the stomach-shaking roar that Amos came running to his mother. Gertie, as always when he or Cassie was frightened by a plane, pressed his face against her bosom and clapped her hand over his ears, for she herself was never able to keep from cringing and shivering at the sounds. Holding him so, she felt some strange hardness against her bosom, and when the plane had gone she asked, “What you been into, son?”
“Playen,” he said, “with this sick man on this necklace.”
Sophronie looked and said: “Oh, Lordy, them youngens has been into Victor’s holy images. You’d better give it to me, honey, an I’ll put it back. He allus keeps that on u table by his bed.”
Gertie studied the cross-shaped Christ on the string of beads, and asked in a low voice, “Why would he want a necklace?”
Sophronie smiled. “Don’t let them like Kathy Daly an Miz Bommarita, let alone Victor, hear you a callen that a necklace. They’d putcha down fer a heathen. It’s a rosary. I never seen one neither till I come up here.”
Gertie continued to look at it. Here was a Christ, she thought, her mother would have liked: the head drawn back in agony, the thorns, the nails, each with a drop of crimson below it, a great splash of scarlet for the wounded side, the face bearing many wrinkles to indicate agony. Sophronie saw her curiosity, and said, as she turned with it to the bedroom: “You’ll see plenty jist like it. They’re all over this town, them Christs on crosses.”
Mrs. Anderson’s fat Georgie scuttled into the room clutching, as if he would never let it go, a china doll dressed in a gown of a soft and shining blue that made Gertie think of the Cumberland on a still October day. Mrs. Anderson, in spite of the heavy baby, sprang up in horror. “Georgie, darling, do be careful. You might break it. It’s Victor’s Child of Prague. His grandmother brought it to this country when she was just a little girl. Give it to Mother now.” She made a quick but futile snatch for the doll.
Georgie whirled back and dived into the passway, narrowly missing the stove, screaming: “I wanna dis, I’m gonna have ut. I’m gonna.”
His mother snatched again. He jumped backward and bumped into the gospel woman, just returning from the bathroom. She took the blue china doll before Georgie knew what was happening. “Thank you, my dear,” she said.
Georgie screamed, leaped for the doll, couldn’t reach it, then kicked the woman sharply on the shin. “Your foot slipped, my dear. You’ll never play football unless you learn to manage your feet better than that,” and she smiled at him as she handed the Child of Prague to Sophronie.
Johala came and drank the coffee Gertie gave her, but the gospel woman lingered in the passway, bent above the block of wood, peeping as if she would see the hidden face. Mrs. Anderson had shifted her now lustily bawling baby to her left shoulder, the better to seize and hold Georgie with her right hand. The effort reddened her face and corded her neck, for Georgie was kicking back and forth and up and down like a prancing pony, trying to get the gospel woman’s attention as he cried: “I can, too, make my feet mind. I wanta kick yu—yu old—youse old—” It was only after the fourth try that he remembered the word he had just heard in the alley. “Bitch,” he cried triumphantly. “Youse old bitch.”
Sophronie stood in the bedroom doorway, twisting her head about to send her voice above Georgie’s screams to Gertie just around the corner from the door. “Thank th Lord they ain’t hurt none a Victor’s pretties. But it’s a wonder. One a them—I figger it was Wheateye—clumb up and got down his Virgin Mary.” The gospel woman glanced up from the block of wood, and Sophronie directed her glance to the bedroom in front of her. “Ain’t that a fancy place in there? Never a week goes by but what that man buys that woman somethen. That quilted rayon bedspread jist last week, an I bet it cost twenty dollars if it cost a dime. An,” Sophronie added, as if it were some unheard-of thing, “he allus pays cash.?
??
The gospel woman nodded, but she seemed absent-minded, and looked again at the block of wood. Then as Mrs. Anderson gradually got Georgie out of the passway toward the outside door, she moved a step nearer Gertie. “You did that, I believe,” and when Gertie had nodded, she said, “You must finish it, make something fine and beautiful.”
“A graven image?” the Negro woman was asking, drinking coffee, her face somehow the face of Peter exploring the wounds of Christ.
“Not a graven image, Johala,” the other said, “but just a thing of beauty in this ugly world. Isn’t that right?” and she turned to Gertie.
Gertie flushed. “I don’t know nothen about things like that. Mostly—well, mostly I jist like tu whittle.”
The gospel woman had listened closely to the halting words, and waited a moment, still listening, as if she hoped there would be more. But Gertie turned toward the wood, and Johala spoke politely, but with a hint of impatience: “Mrs. Mac—Bales, Floyd’s waiting over on that through street. He might get a ticket.”
“That would be interesting,” the gospel woman said, listening to Mrs. Anderson, who was explaining somewhat guiltily to Sophronie that she’d decided to take Judy home and feed her, though it was still almost an hour ahead of schedule.
“Did you ever try feeding a child when it was hungry? Breast fed?” Mrs. Bales came closer and smiled at the hungry Judy.
Mrs. Anderson looked horrified, “Oh, no, all pediatricians know it’s very detrimental to a child’s emotional and social development to breast feed it after it’s six months old. They gain much faster on formula.”
“Really?” Mrs. Bales said, beginning to draw on her boots.
Sophronie draped her robe more tightly about her bony hips, picked up Gertie’s rope-tied carton of bed clothing, and said to the coatless Wheateye, “Git, honey.”
Mrs. Anderson, with the hungry Judy screaming and gnawing her shoulder, was stalled on Max’s steps because Georgie, good-humored now, had threatened to get mad again if his mother didn’t stand and watch him be a snow plow. She looked enviously toward the thin Sophronie and her thin child, and said to Gertie, who was coming down the steps with the block of wood: “If I let Georgie run around in this weather without a coat, he’d be hospitalized for a week. Her children are almost never sick, but they’ve never heard of cod-liver oil or vitamin pills,” and she gave a puzzled headshake.