"No!" Martha said sharply. "He wasn't a beast. He was a man. In some ways--in most ways--he was a bad man, but a man is what he was. And he did have that something you could call 'quality' without a smirk on your face, although it only came out completely in the things he wrote."
"Huh!" Darcy looked disdainfully at Martha from below drawn-together brows. "You read one of his books, did you?"
"Honey, I read them all. He'd only written three by the time I went to Mama Delorme's with that white powder in late 1959, but I'd read two of them. In time I got all the way caught up, because he wrote even slower than I read." She grinned. "And that's pretty slow!"
Darcy looked doubtfully toward Martha's bookcase. There were books there by Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown, Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed, but the three shelves were pretty much dominated by paperback romances and Agatha Christie mystery stories.
"Stories about war don't hardly seem like your pick an glory, Martha, if you know what I mean."
"Of course I know," Martha said. She got up and brought them each a fresh beer. "I'll tell you a funny thing, Dee: if he'd been a nice man, I probably never would have read even one of them. And I'll tell you an even funnier one: if he'd been a nice man, I don't think they would have been as good as they were."
"What are you talking about, woman?"
"I don't know, exactly. Just listen, all right?"
"All right."
"Well, it didn't take me until the Kennedy assassination to figure out what kind of man he was. I knew that by the summer of '58. By then I'd seen what a low opinion he had of the human race in general--not his friends, he would've died for them, but everyone else. Everyone was out looking for a buck to stroke, he used to say--stroking the buck, stroking the buck, everyone was stroking the buck. It seemed like him and his friends thought stroking the buck was a real bad thing, unless they were playing poker and had a whole mess of em spread out on the table. Seemed to me like they stroked them then, all right. Seemed to me like then they stroked them plenty, him included.
"There was a lot of big ugly under his Southern-gentleman top layer--he thought people who were trying to do good or improve the world were about the funniest things going, he hated the blacks and the Jews, and he thought we ought to H-bomb the Russians out of existence before they could do it to us. Why not? he'd say. They were part of what he called 'the sub-human strain of the race.' To him that seemed to mean Jews, blacks, Italians, Indians, and anyone whose family didn't summer on the Outer Banks.
"I listened to him spout all that ignorance and high-toned filth, and naturally I started to wonder about why he was a famous writer. . . how he could be a famous writer. I wanted to know what it was the critics saw in him, but I was a lot more interested in what ordinary folks like me saw in him--the people who made his books best-sellers as soon as they came out. Finally I decided to find out for myself. I went down to the Public Library and borrowed his first book, Blaze of Heaven.
"I was expecting it'd turn out to be something like in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, but it didn't. The book was about these five men and what happened to them in the war, and what happened to their wives and girlfriends back home at the same time. When I saw on the jacket it was about the war, I kind of rolled my eyes, thinking it would be like all those boring stories they told each other."
"It wasn't?"
"I read the first ten or twenty pages and thought, This ain't so good. It ain't as bad as I thought it'd be, but nothing's happening. Then I read another thirty pages and I kind of . . . well, I kind of lost myself. Next time I looked up it was almost midnight and I was two hundred pages into that book. I thought to myself, You got to go to bed, Martha. You got to go right now, because five-thirty comes early. But I read another forty pages in spite of how heavy my eyes were getting, and it was quarter to one before I finally got up to brush my teeth."
Martha stopped, looking off toward the darkened window and all the miles of night outside it, her eyes hazed with remembering, her lips pressed together in a light frown. She shook her head a little.
"I didn't know how a man who was so boring when you had to listen to him could write so you didn't never want to close the book, nor ever see it end, either. How a nasty, cold-hearted man like him could still make up characters so real you wanted to cry over em when they died. When Noah got hit and killed by a taxi-cab near the end of Blaze of Heaven, just a month after his part of the war was over, I did cry. I didn't know how a sour, cynical man like Jefferies could make a body care so much about things that weren't real at all--about things he'd made up out of his own head. And there was something else in that book . . . a kind of sunshine. It was full of pain and bad things, but there was sweetness in it, too. . . and love. . . ."
She startled Darcy by laughing out loud.
"There was a fella worked at the hotel back then named Billy Beck, a nice young man who was majoring in English at Fordham when he wasn't on the door. He and I used to talk sometimes--"
"Was he a brother?"
"God, no!" Martha laughed again. "Wasn't no black doormen at Le Palais until 1965. Black porters and bellboys and car-park valets, but no black doormen. Wasn't considered right. Quality people like Mr. Jefferies wouldn't have liked it.
"Anyway, I asked Billy how the man's books could be so wonderful when he was such a booger in person. Billy asked me if I knew the one about the fat disc jockey with the thin voice, and I said I didn't know what he was talking about. Then he said he didn't know the answer to my question, but he told me something a prof of his had said about Thomas Wolfe. This prof said that some writers--and Wolfe was one of them--were no shakes at all until they sat down to a desk and took up pens in their hands. He said that a pen to fellows like that was like a telephone booth is to Clark Kent. He said that Thomas Wolfe was like a . . ." She hesitated, then smiled. ". . . that he was like a divine wind-chime. He said a wind-chime isn't nothing on its own, but when the wind blows through it, it makes a lovely noise.
"I think Peter Jefferies was like that. He was quality, he had been raised quality and he was, but the quality in him wasn't nothing he could take credit for. It was like God banked it for him and he just spent it. I'll tell you something you probably won't believe: after I'd read a couple of his books, I started to feel sorry for him."
"Sorry?"
"Yes. Because the books were beautiful and the man who made em was ugly as sin. He really was like my Johnny, but in a way Johnny was luckier, because he never dreamed of a better life, and Mr. Jefferies did. His books were his dreams, where he let himself believe in the world he laughed at and sneered at when he was awake."
She asked Darcy if she wanted another beer. Darcy said she would pass.
"Well if you change your mind, just holler. And you might change it because right about here is where the water gets murky."
*
"One other thing about the man," Martha said. "He wasn't a sexy man. At least not the way you usually think about a man being sexy."
"You mean he was a--"
"No, he wasn't a homosexual, or a gay, or whatever it is you're supposed to call them these days. He wasn't sexy for men, but he wasn't what you could call sexy for women, either. There were two, maybe three times in all the years I did for him when I seen cigarette butts with lipstick on them in the bedroom ashtrays when I cleaned up, and smelled perfume on the pillows. One of those times I also found an eyeliner pencil in the bathroom--it had rolled under the door and into the corner. I reckon they were call-girls (the pillows never smelled like the kind of perfume decent women wear), but two or three times in all those years isn't much, is it?"
"It sure isn't," Darcy said, thinking of all the panties she had pulled out from under beds, all the condoms she had seen floating in unflushed toilets, all the false eyelashes she had found on and under pillows.
Martha sat without speaking for a few moments, lost in thought, then looked up. "I tell you what!" she said.
"That man was sexy for himself! It sounds crazy but it's true. There sure wasn't any shortage of jizz in him--I know that from all the sheets I changed."
Darcy nodded.
"And there'd always be a little jar of cold cream in the bathroom, or sometimes on the table by his bed. I think he used it when he pulled off. To keep from getting chapped skin."
The two women looked at each other and suddenly began giggling hysterically.
"You sure he wasn't the other way, honey?" Darcy asked finally.
"I said cold cream, not Vas eline," Martha said, and that did it; for the next five minutes the two women laughed until they cried.
*
But it wasn't really funny, and Darcy knew it. And when Martha went on, she simply listened, hardly believing what she was hearing.
"It was maybe a week after that time at Mama Delorme's, or maybe it was two," Martha said. "I don't remember. It's been a long time since it all happened. By then I was pretty sure I was pregnant--I wasn't throwing up or nothing, but there's a feeling to it. It don't come from places you'd think. It's like your gums and your toenails and the bridge of your nose figure out what's going on before the rest of you. Or you want something like chop suey at three in the afternoon and you say, 'Whoa, now! What's this?" But you know what it is. I didn't say a word to Johnny, though--I knew I'd have to, eventually, but I was scared to."
"I don't blame you," Darcy said.
"I was in the bedroom of Jefferies's suite one late morning, and while I did the neatening up I was thinking about Johnny and how I might break the news about the baby to him. Jefferies had gone out someplace--to one of his publishers' meetings, likely as not. The bed was a double, messed up on both sides, but that didn't mean nothing; he was just a restless sleeper. Sometimes when I came in the groundsheet would be pulled right out from underneath the mattress.
"Well, I stripped off the coverlet and the two blankets underneath--he was thin-blooded and always slept under all he could--and then I started to strip the top sheet off backward, and I seen it right away. It was his spend, mostly dried on there.
"I stood there looking at it for . . . oh, I don't know how long. It was like I was hypnotized. I saw him, lying there all by himself after his friends had gone home, lying there smelling nothing but the smoke they'd left behind and his own sweat. I saw him lying there on his back and then starting to make love to Mother Thumb and her four daughters. I saw that as clear as I see you now, Darcy; the only thing I didn't see is what he was thinking about, what sort of pictures he was making in his head. . . and considering the way he talked and how he was when he wasn't writing his books, I'm glad I didn't."
Darcy was looking at her, frozen, saying nothing.
"Next thing I knew, this . . . this feeling came over me." She paused, thinking, then shook her head slowly and deliberately. "This compulsion came over me. It was like wanting chop suey at three in the afternoon, or ice cream and pickles at two in the morning, or . . . what did you want, Darcy?"
"Rind of bacon," Darcy said through lips so numb she could hardly feel them. "My husband went out and couldn't find me any, but he brought back a bag of those pork rinds and I just gobbled them."
Martha nodded and began to speak again. Thirty seconds later Darcy bolted for the bathroom, where she struggled briefly with her gorge and then vomited up all the beer she'd drunk.
Look on the bright side, she thought, fumbling weakly for the flush. No hangover to worry about. And then, on the heels of that: How am I going to look her in the eyes? Just how am I supposed to do that?
It turned out not to be a problem. When she turned around, Martha was standing in the bathroom doorway and looking at her with warm concern.
"You all right?"
"Yes." Darcy tried a smile, and to her immense relief it felt genuine on her lips. "I . . . I just . . ."
"I know," Martha said. "Believe me, I do. Should I finish, or have you heard enough?"
"Finish," Darcy said decisively, and took her friend by the arm. "But in the living room. I don't even want to look at the refrigerator, let alone open the door."
"Amen to that."
A minute later they were settled on opposite ends of the shabby but comfortable living-room couch.
"You sure, honey?"
Darcy nodded.
"All right." But Martha sat quiet a moment longer, looking down at the slim hands clasped in her lap, conning the past as a submarine commander might con hostile waters through his periscope. At last she raised her head, turned to Darcy, and resumed her story.
*
"I worked the rest of that day in kind of a daze. It was like I was hypnotized. People talked to me, and I answered them, but I seemed to be hearing them through a glass wall and speaking back to them the same way. I'm hypnotized, all right, I remember thinking. She hypnotized me. That old woman. Gave me one of those post-hypnotic suggestions, like when a stage hypnotist says, 'Someone says the word Chiclets to you, you're gonna get down on all fours and bark like a dog,' and the guy who was hypnotized does it even if no one says Chiclets to him for the next ten years. She put something in that tea and hypnotized me and then told me to do that. That nasty thing.
"I knew why she would, too--an old woman superstitious enough to believe in stump-water cures, and how you could witch a man into love by putting a little drop of blood from your period onto the heel of his foot while he was sleeping, and cross-tie walkers, and God alone knows what else . . . if a woman like that with a bee in her bonnet about natural fathers could do hypnotism, hypnotizing a woman like me into doing what I did might be just what she would do. Because she would believe it. And I had named him to her, hadn't I? Yes indeed.
"It never occurred to me then that I hadn't remembered hardly anything at all about going to Mama Delorme's until after I did what I did in Mr. Jefferies's bedroom. It did that night, though.
"I got through the day all right. I mean, I didn't cry or scream or carry on or anything like that. My sister Kissy acted worse the time she was drawing water from the old well round dusk and a bat flew up from it and got caught in her hair. There was just that feeling that I was behind a wall of glass, and I figured if that was all, I could get along with it.
"Then, when I got home, I all at once got thirsty. I was thirstier than ever in my life--it felt like a sandstorm was going on in my throat. I started to drink water. It seemed like I just couldn't drink enough. And I started to spit. I just spit and spit and spit. Then I started to feel sick to my stomach. I ran down to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and stuck out my tongue to see if I could see anything there, any sign of what I'd done, and of course I couldn't. I thought, There! Do you feel better now?
"But I didn't. I felt worse. I knelt down in front of the toilet and I did what you did, Darcy, only I did a lot more of it. I vomited until I thought I was going to pass out. I was crying and begging God to please forgive me, to let me stop puking before I lost the baby, if I really was quick with one. And then I remembered myself standing there in his bedroom with my fingers in my mouth, not even thinking about what I was doing--I tell you I could see myself doing it, as if I was looking at myself in a movie. And then I vomited again.
"Mrs. Parker heard me and came to the door and asked if I was all right. That helped me get hold of myself a little, and by the time Johnny came in that night, I was over the worst of it. He was drunk, spoiling for a fight. When I wouldn't give him one he hit me in the eye anyway and walked out. I was almost glad he hit me, because it gave me something else to think about.
"The next day when I went into Mr. Jefferies's suite he was sitting in the parlor, still in his pajamas, scribbling away on one of his yellow legal pads. He always travelled with a bunch of them, held together with a big red rubber band, right up until the end. When he came to Le Palais that last time and I didn't see them, I knew he'd made up his mind to die. I wasn't a bit sorry, neither."
Martha looked toward the living-room window with an expression which held nothin
g of mercy or forgiveness; it was a cold look, one which reported an utter absence of the heart.
"When I saw he hadn't gone out I was relieved, because it meant I could put off the cleaning. He didn't like the maids around when he was working, you see, and so I figured he might not want housekeeping service until Yvonne came on at three.
"I said, 'I'll come back later, Mr. Jefferies.'
" 'Do it now,' he said. 'Just keep quiet while you do. I've got a bitch of a headache and a hell of an idea. The combination is killing me.'
"Any other time he would have told me to come back, I swear it. It seemed like I could almost hear that old black mama laughing.
"I went into the bathroom and started tidying around, taking out the used towels and putting up fresh ones, replacing the soap with a new bar, putting fresh matches out, and all the time I'm thinking, You can't hypnotize someone who doesn't want to be hypnotized, old woman. Whatever it was you put in the tea that day, whatever it was you told me to do or how many times you told me to do it, I'm wise to you--wise to you and shut of you.
"I went into the bedroom and I looked at the bed. I expected it would look to me like a closet does to a kid who's scared of the bogeyman, but I saw it was just a bed. I knew I wasn't going to do anything, and it was a relief. So I stripped it and there was another of those sticky patches, still drying, as if he'd woke up horny an hour or so before and just took care of himself.
"I seen it and waited to see if I was going to feel anything about it. I didn't. It was just the leftovers of a man with a letter and no mailbox to put it in, like you and I have seen a hundred times before. That old woman was no more a bruja woman than I was. I might be pregnant or I might not be, but if I was, it was Johnny's child. He was the only man I'd ever lain with, and nothin I found on that white man's sheets--or anywhere else, for that matter--was gonna change that.
"It was a cloudy day, but at the second I thought that, the sun came out like God had put His final amen on the subject. I don't recall ever feeling so relieved. I stood there thanking God everything was all right, and all the time I was sayin that prayer of gratitude I was scoopin that stuff up off the sheet--all of it I could get, anyway--and stickin it in my mouth and swallowin it down.