"A monkey."
She saw Andrew's eyes in the rear-view mirror and was sorry for the way his eyes looked. Sometimes your urine wasn't the only thing you couldn't hold.
"I'm sorry, Miz Holmes."
"No," she said, rubbing at her temples again. "I am the one who is sorry. It's been a trying three days, Andrew."
"I should think so," he said in a shocked old-maidish voice that made her laugh in spite of herself. But most of her wasn't laughing. She thought she had known what she was getting into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it could get. She had been wrong.
A trying three days. Well, that was one way to put it. Another might be that her three days in Oxford, Mississippi had been a short season in hell. But there were some things you couldn't say. Some things you would die before saying . . . unless you were called upon to testify to them before the Throne of God the Father Almighty, where, she supposed, even the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorms in that strange gray jelly between your ears (the scientists said that gray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn't a hoot and a half she didn't know what was) must be admitted.
"I just want to get home and bathe, bathe, bathe, and sleep, sleep, sleep. Then I reckon I will be as right as rain."
"Why, sure! That's just what you're going to be!" Andrew wanted to apologize for something, and this was as close as he could come. And beyond this he didn't want to risk further conversation. So the two of them rode in unaccustomed silence to the gray Victorian block of apartments on the corner of Fifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray Victorian block of apartments, and she supposed that made her a blockbuster, and she knew there were people in those poshy-poshy flats who would not speak to her unless they absolutely had to, and she didn't really care. Besides, she was above them, and they knew she was above them. It had occurred to her on more than one occasion that it must have galled some of them mightily, knowing there was a nigger living in the penthouse apartment of this fine staid old building where once the only black hands allowed had been clad in white gloves or perhaps the thin black leather ones of a chauffeur. She hoped it did gall them mightily, and scolded herself for being mean, for being unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn't been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn't seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either. It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad--no, worse, at least as far as the Movement was concerned, it was counterproductive. They were going to win the rights they needed to win, and probably this year: Johnson, mindful of the legacy which had been left him by the slain President (and perhaps hoping to put another nail in the coffin of Barry Goldwater), would do more than oversee the passage of the Civil Rights Act; if necessary he would ram it into law. So it was important to minimize the scarring and the hurt. There was more work to be done. Hate would not help do that work. Hate would, in fact, hinder it.
But sometimes you went on hating just the same.
Oxford Town had taught her that, too.
2
Detta Walker had absolutely no interest in the Movement and much more modest digs. She lived in the loft of a peeling Greenwich Village apartment building. Odetta didn't know about the loft and Detta didn't know about the penthouse and the only one left who suspected something was not quite right was Andrew Feeny, the chauffeur. He had begun working for Odetta's father when Odetta was fourteen and Detta Walker hardly existed at all.
Sometimes Odetta disappeared. These disappearances might be a matter of hours or of days. Last summer she had disappeared for three weeks and Andrew had been ready to call the police when Odetta called him one evening and asked him to bring the car around at ten the next day--she planned to do some shopping, she said.
It trembled on his lips to cry out Miz Holmes! Where have you been? But he had asked this before and had received only puzzled stares--truly puzzled stares, he was sure--in return. Right here, she would say. Why, right here, Andrew--you've been driving me two or three places every day, haven't you? You aren't starting to go a little mushy in the head, are you? Then she would laugh and if she was feeling especially good (as she often seemed to feel after her disappearances), she would pinch his cheek.
"Very good, Miz Holmes," he had said. "Ten it is."
That scary time she had been gone for three weeks, Andrew had put down the phone, closed his eyes, and said a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Miz Holmes's safe return. Then he had rung Howard, the doorman at her building.
"What time did she come in?"
"Just about twenty minutes ago," Howard said.
"Who brought her?"
"Dunno. You know how it is. Different car every time. Sometimes they park around the block and I don't see 'em at all, don't even know she's back until I hear the buzzer and look out and see it's her." Howard paused, then added: "She's got one hell of a bruise on her cheek."
Howard had been right. It sure had been one hell of a bruise, and now it was getting better. Andrew didn't like to think what it might have looked like when it was fresh. Miz Holmes appeared promptly at ten the next morning, wearing a silk sundress with spaghetti-thin straps (this had been late July), and by then the bruise had started to yellow. She had made only a perfunctory effort to cover it with make-up, as if knowing that too much effort to cover it would only draw further attention to it.
"How did you get that, Miz Holmes?" he asked.
She laughed merrily. "You know me, Andrew--clumsy as ever. My hand slipped on the grab-handle while I was getting out of the tub yesterday--I was in a hurry to catch the national news. I fell and banged the side of my face." She gauged his face. "You're getting ready to start blithering about doctors and examinations, aren't you? Don't bother answering; after all these years I can read you like a book. I won't go, so you needn't bother asking. I'm just as fine as paint. Onward, Andrew! I intend to buy half of Saks, all of Gimbels, and eat everything at Four Seasons in between."
"Yes, Miz Holmes," he had said, and smiled. It was a forced smile, and forcing it was not easy. That bruise wasn't a day old; it was a week old, at least . . . and he knew better, anyway, didn't he? He had called her every night at seven o'clock for the last week, because if there was one time when you could catch Miz Holmes in her place, it was when the Huntley-Brinkley Report came on. A regular junkie for her news was Miz Holmes. He had done it every night, that was, except last night. Then he had gone over and wheedled the passkey from Howard. A conviction had been growing on him steadily that she had had just the sort of accident she had described . . . only instead of getting a bruise or a broken bone, she had died, died alone, and was lying up there dead right now. He had let himself in, heart thumping, feeling like a cat in a dark room criss-crossed with piano wires. Only there had been nothing to be nervous about. There was a butter-dish on the kitchen counter, and although the butter had been covered it had been out long enough to be growing a good crop of mould. He got there at ten minutes of seven and had left by five after. In the course of his quick examination of the apartment, he had glanced into the bathroom. The tub had been dry, the towels neatly--even austerely--arrayed, the room's many grab-handles polished to a bright steel gleam that was unspotted with water.
He knew the accident she had described had not happened.
But Andrew had not believed she was lying, either. She had believed what she had told him.
He looked in the rear-view mirror again and saw her rubbing her temples lightly with the tips of her fingers. He didn't like it. He had seen her do that too many times before one of her disappearances.
3
Andrew left the motor running so she could have the benefit of the heater, then went around to the trunk. He looked at her two suitcases with another wince. They looked as if petulant men with small minds and large bodies had kicked them relentlessly back and forth, damaging the bags in a way they did not quite dare damage Miz Holmes herself--the way they might have damaged him, for instance, if he had been there. It wasn't
just that she was a woman; she was a nigger, an uppity northern nigger messing where she had no business messing, and they probably figured a woman like that deserved just what she got. Thing was, she was also a rich nigger. Thing was, she was almost as well-known to the American public as Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King. Thing was, she'd gotten her rich nigger face on the cover of Time magazine and it was a little harder to get away with sticking someone like that in the 'toolies and then saying What? No sir, boss, we sho dint see nobody looked like that down here, did we, boys? Thing was, it was a little harder to work yourself up to hurting a woman who was the only heir to Holmes Dental Industries when there were twelve Holmes plants in the sunny South, one of them just one county over from Oxford Town, Oxford Town.
So they'd done to her suitcases what they didn't dare do to her.
He looked at these mute indications of her stay in Oxford Town with shame and fury and love, emotions as mute as the scars on the luggage that had gone away looking smart and had come back looking dumb and thumped. He looked, temporarily unable to move, and his breath puffed out on the frosty air.
Howard was coming out to help, but Andrew paused a moment longer before grasping the handles of the cases. Who are you, Miz Holmes? Who are you really? Where do you go sometimes, and what do you do that seems so bad that you have to make up a false history of the missing hours or days even to yourself? And he thought something else in the moment before Howard arrived, something weirdly apt: Where's the rest of you?
You want to quit thinking like that. If anyone around here was going to do any thinking like that it would be Miz Holmes, but she doesn't and so you don't need to, either.
Andrew lifted the bags out of the trunk and handed them to Howard, who asked in a low voice: "Is she all right?"
"I think so," Andrew replied, also pitching his voice low. "Just tired is all. Tired all the way down to her roots."
Howard nodded, took the battered suitcases, and started back inside. He paused only long enough to tip his cap to Odetta Holmes--who was almost invisible behind the smoked glass windows--in a soft and respectful salute.
When he was gone, Andrew took out the collapsed stainless steel scaffolding at the bottom of the trunk and began to unfold it. It was a wheelchair.
Since August 19th, 1959, some five and a half years before, the part of Odetta Holmes from the knees down had been as missing as those blank hours and days.
4
Before the subway incident, Detta Walker had only been conscious a few times--these were like coral islands which look isolated to one above them but are, in fact, only nodes in the spine of a long archipelago which is mostly underwater. Odetta suspected Detta not at all, and Detta had no idea that there was such a person as Odetta . . . but Detta at least had a clear understanding that something was wrong, that someone was fucking with her life. Odetta's imagination novelized all sorts of things which had happened when Detta was in charge of her body; Detta was not so clever. She thought she remembered things, some things, at least, but a lot of the time she didn't.
Detta was at least partially aware of the blanks.
She could remember the china plate. She could remember that. She could remember slipping it into the pocket of her dress, looking over her shoulder all the while to make sure the Blue Woman wasn't there, peeking. She had to make sure because the china plate belonged to the Blue Woman. The china plate was, Detta understood in some vague way, a forspecial. Detta took it for that why. Detta remembered taking it to a place she knew (although she didn't know how she knew) as The Drawers, a smoking trash-littered hole in the earth where she had once seen a burning baby with plastic skin. She remembered putting the plate carefully down on the gravelly ground and then starting to step on it and stopping, remembered taking off her plain cotton panties and putting them into the pocket where the plate had been, and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against the cut in her at the place where Old Stupid God had joined her and all other girlsandwomen imperfectly, but something about that place must be right, because she remembered the jolt, remembered wanting to press, remembered not pressing, remembered how delicious her vagina had been naked, without the cotton panties in the way of it and the world, and she had not pressed, not until her shoe pressed, her black patent leather shoe, not until her shoe pressed down on the plate, then she pressed on the cut with her finger the way she was pressing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate with her foot, she remembered the way the black patent leather shoe covered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the plate, she remembered the press, yes, she remembered pressing in The Drawers, pressing with finger and foot, remembered the delicious promise of finger and cut, remembered that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle pleasure had skewered upward from that cut into her guts like an arrow, she remembered the cry which had broken from her lips, an unpleasant cawing like the sound of a crow scared up from a cornpatch, she could remember staring dully at the fragments of the plate and then taking the plain white cotton panties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting them on again, step-ins, so she had heard them called in some time unhoused in memory and drifting loose like turves on a floodtide, step-ins, good, because first you stepped out to do your business and then you stepped back in, first one shiny patent leather shoe and then the other, good, panties were good, she could remember drawing them up her legs so clearly, drawing them past her knees, a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean pink new babyskin, yes, she could remember so clearly it might not have been a week ago or yesterday but only one single moment ago, she could remember how the waistband had reached the hem of her party dress, the clear contrast of white cotton against brown skin, like cream, yes, like that, cream from a pitcher caught suspended over coffee, the texture, the panties disappearing under the hem of the dress, except then the dress was burnt orange and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton, they were nylon, cheap see-through nylon panties, cheap in more ways than one, and she remembered stepping out of them, she remembered how they glimmered on the floormat of the '46 Dodge DeSoto, yes, how white they were, how cheap they were, not anything dignified like underwear but cheap panties, the girl was cheap and it was good to be cheap, good to be on sale, to be on the block not even like a whore but like a good breedsow; she remembered no round china plate but the round white face of a boy, some surprised drunk fraternity boy, he was no china plate but his face was as round as the Blue Woman's china plate had been, and there was webbing on his cheeks, and this webbing looked as blue as the webbing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate had been, but that was only because the neon was red, the neon was garish, in the dark the neon from the roadhouse sign made the spreading blood from the places on his cheeks where she had clawed him look blue, and he had said Why did you why did you why did you do, and then he unrolled the window so he could get his face outside to puke and she remembered hearing Dodie Stevens on the jukebox, singing about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big Panama with a purple hatband, she remembered the sound of his puking was like gravel in a cement mixer, and his penis, which moments before had been a livid exclamation point rising from the tufted tangle of his pubic hair, was collapsing into a weak white question mark; she remembered the hoarse gravel sounds of his vomiting stopped and then started again and she thought Well I guess he ain't made enough to lay this foundation yet and laughing and pressing her finger (which now came equipped with a long shaped nail) against her vagina which was bare but no longer bare because it was overgrown with its own coarse briared tangle, and there had been the same brittle breaking snap inside her, and it was still as much pain as it was pleasure (but better, far better, than nothing at all), and then he was grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone Oh you goddamned nigger cunt and she went on laughing just the same, dodging him easily and snatching up her panties and opening the door on her side of the car, feeling the last blind thud of his finger
s on the back of her blouse as she ran into a May night that was redolent of early honeysuckle, red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel of some postwar parking lot, stuffing her panties, her cheap slick nylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a purse jumbled with a teenager's cheerful conglomeration of cosmetics, she was running, the light was stuttering, and then she was twenty-three and it was not panties but a rayon scarf, and she was casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the Nice Notions section of Macy's--a scarf which sold at that time for $1.99.
Cheap.
Cheap like the white nylon panties.
Cheap.
Like her.
The body she inhabited was that of a woman who had inherited millions, but that was not known and didn't matter--the scarf was white, the edging blue, and there was that same little breaking sense of pleasure as she sat in the back seat of the taxi, and, oblivious of the driver, held the scarf in one hand, looking at it fixedly, while her other hand crept up under her tweed skirt and beneath the leg-band of her white panties, and that one long dark finger took care of the business that needed to be taken care of in a single merciless stroke.