“He ain’t got to be like him—from him is enough.”
“I’ll be responsible for—”
“Stop messing with me, Guitar. Get him out. He ain’t old enough to have wet dreams.”
The pilots laughed and a man in a gray straw hat with a white band said, “Aw, let the boy stay, Feather.”
“You shut your mouth. I’m running this.”
“What harm can he do? A twelve-year-old kid.” He smiled at Milkman, who stopped himself from saying, No, thirteen.
“But it ain’t your problem, is it?” asked Feather. “His daddy ain’t your landlord, is he, and you ain’t got no operating license to hang on to either. You ain’t got nothing….”
Feather turned on the man with the white hatband the same acid manner he’d used with the boys. Guitar took the opportunity offered by Feather’s new target to shoot his hand out like a double-edged hatchet slamming into a tree, and shout, “Later for you, man. Come on. Let’s shake this place.” His voice now was loud and deep—loud enough and deep enough for two. Milkman slid his hands into his back pockets and followed his friend to the door. He stretched his neck a little to match the chilly height he hoped the soldiers had seen in his eyes.
Silently they ambled down Tenth Street until they reached a stone bench that jutted from the sidewalk near the curb. They stopped there and sat down, their backs to the eyes of two men in white smocks who were watching them. One of the men leaned in the doorway of a barbershop. The other sat in a chair tilted back to the plate-glass window of the shop. They were the owners of the barbershop, Railroad Tommy and Hospital Tommy. Neither boy spoke, not to the men nor to each other. They sat and watched the traffic go by.
“Have all the halls of academe crumbled, Guitar?” Hospital Tommy spoke from his chair. His eyes were milky, like those of very old people, but the rest of him was firm, lithe, and young-looking. His tone was casual but suggested authority nonetheless.
“No, sir.” Guitar answered him over his shoulder.
“Then what, pray, are you doing out here in the streets at this time of day?”
Guitar shrugged. “We just took a day off, Mr. Tommy.”
“And your companion? Is he on sabbatical too?”
Guitar nodded. Hospital Tommy talked like an encyclopedia and Guitar had to guess at most of his words. Milkman kept looking at the cars going by.
“Neither one of you appears to be having much fun on your holiday. You could have stayed in the halls of academe and looked evil.”
Guitar fished for a cigarette and offered one to Milkman. “Feather made me mad is all.”
“Feather?”
“Yeah. He wouldn’t let us in. I go in there all the time. All the time and he don’t say nothing. But today he throws us out. Said my friend here is too young. Can you beat that? Feather? Worrying about somebody’s age?”
“I didn’t know Feather had so much as a brain cell to worry with.”
“He don’t. Just showing off is all. He wouldn’t even let me have a bottle of beer.”
Railroad Tommy laughed softly from the doorway. “Is that all? He wouldn’t let you have a beer?” He rubbed the back of his neck and then crooked a finger at Guitar. “Come over here, boy, and let me tell you about some other stuff you are not going to have. Come on over here.”
Reluctantly they stood up and sidled closer to the laughing man.
“You think that’s something? Not having a beer? Well, let me ask you something. You ever stood stock still in the galley of the Baltimore and Ohio dining car in the middle of the night when the kitchen closed down and everything’s neat and ready for the next day? And the engine’s highballing down the track and three of your buddies is waiting for you with a brand-new deck of cards?”
Guitar shook his head. “No, I never…”
“That’s right, you never. And you never going to. That’s one more thrill you not going to have, let alone a bottle of beer.”
Guitar smiled. “Mr. Tommy,” he began, but Tommy cut him off.
“You ever pull fourteen days straight and come home to a sweet woman, clean sheets, and a fifth of Wild Turkey? Eh?” He looked at Milkman. “Did you?”
Milkman smiled and said, “No, sir.”
“No? Well, don’t look forward to it, cause you not going to have that either.”
Hospital Tommy drew a pinfeather toothpick from under his smock. “Don’t tease the boy, Tommy.”
“Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ’em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ’em to. No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. That’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ‘29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.”
A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy.
“Feather refused them a beer,” he said. The men laughed.
“And no baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.”
“No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat. “You breaking my heart!”
“Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.”
“Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.”
“Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.”
“What’s a baked Alaska?” They left the Tommys just as they had found them and continued down Tenth Street.
“Something sweet,” answered Guitar. “A dessert.”
“Taste good?”
“I don’t know. I can’t eat sweets.”
“You can’t?” Milkman was amazed. “Why not?”
“Makes me sick.”
“You don’t like nothing sweet?”
“Fruit, but nothing with sugar. Candy, cake, stuff like that. I don’t even like to smell it. Makes me want to throw up.”
Milkman searched for a physical cause. He wasn’t sure he trusted anybody who didn’t like sweets. “You must have sugar diabetes.”
“You don’t get sugar diabetes from not eating sugar. You get it from eating too much sugar.”
“Then what is it, then?”
“I don’t know. It makes me think of dead people. And white people. And I start to puke.”
“Dead people?”
“Yeah. And white people.”
“I don’t get it.”
Guitar said nothing, so Milkman continued, “How long you been like that?”
“Since I was little. Since my father got sliced up in a sawmill and his boss came by and gave us k
ids some candy. Divinity. A big sack of divinity. His wife made it special for us. It’s sweet, divinity is. Sweeter than syrup. Real sweet. Sweeter than…” He stopped walking and wiped from his forehead the beads of sweat that were collecting there. His eyes paled and wavered. He spit on the sidewalk. “Ho—hold it,” he whispered, and stepped into a space between a fried-fish restaurant and Lilly’s Beauty Parlor.
Milkman waited on the sidewalk, staring at the curtained window of the beauty shop. Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t. The women didn’t want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed.
When Guitar emerged, his eyes were teary from the effort of dry heaving. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get us some weed. That’s one thing I can have.”
By the time Milkman was fourteen he had noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When he stood barefoot and straight as a pole, his left foot was about half an inch off the floor. So he never stood straight; he slouched or leaned or stood with a hip thrown out, and he never told anybody about it—ever. When Lena said, “Mama, what is he walking like that for?” he said, “I’ll walk any way I want to, including over your ugly face.” Ruth said, “Be quiet, you two. It’s just growing pains, Lena.” Milkman knew better. It wasn’t a limp—not at all—just the suggestion of one, but it looked like an affected walk, the strut of a very young man trying to appear more sophisticated than he was. It bothered him and he acquired movements and habits to disguise what to him was a burning defect. He sat with his left ankle on his right knee, never the other way around. And he danced each new dance with a curious stiff-legged step that the girls loved and other boys eventually copied. The deformity was mostly in his mind. Mostly, but not completely, for he did have shooting pains in that leg after several hours on a basketball court. He favored it, believed it was polio, and felt secretly connected to the late President Roosevelt for that reason. Even when everybody was raving about Truman because he had set up a Committee on Civil Rights, Milkman secretly preferred FDR and felt very very close to him. Closer, in fact, to him than to his own father, for Macon had no imperfection and age seemed to strengthen him. Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared. Macon was clean-shaven; Milkman was desperate for a mustache. Macon wore bow ties; Milkman wore four-in-hands. Macon didn’t part his hair; Milkman had a part shaved into his. Macon hated tobacco; Milkman tried to put a cigarette in his mouth every fifteen minutes. Macon hoarded his money; Milkman gave his away. But he couldn’t help sharing with Macon his love of good shoes and fine thin socks. And he did try, as his father’s employee, to do the work the way Macon wanted it done.
Macon was delighted. His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth, and he was relieved at not having to walk all over town like a peddler collecting rents. It made his business more dignified, and he had time to think, to plan, to visit the bank men, to read the public notices, auctions, to find out what plots were going for taxes, unclaimed heirs’ property, where roads were being built, what supermarkets, schools; and who was trying to sell what to the government for the housing projects that were going to be built. The quickie townlets that were springing up around war plants. He knew as a Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of the pie. But there were properties nobody wanted yet, or little edges of property somebody didn’t want Jews to have, or Catholics to have, or properties nobody knew were of any value yet. There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of the crust in 1945. Filling that could be his. Everything had improved for Macon Dead during the war. Except Ruth. And years later when the war was over and that pie filling had spilled over into his very lap, had stickied his hands and weighed his stomach down into a sagging paunch, he still wished he had strangled her back in 1921. She hadn’t stopped spending occasional nights out of the house, but she was fifty years old now and what lover could she have kept so long? What lover could there be that even Freddie didn’t know about? Macon decided it was of no importance, and less often did he get angry enough to slap her. Particularly after the final time, which became final because his son jumped up and knocked him back into the radiator.
Milkman was twenty-two then and since he had been fucking for six years, some of them with the same woman, he’d begun to see his mother in a new light. She was no longer the person who worried him about galoshes and colds and food, who stood in the way of most of the little pleasures he could take at home because they all involved some form of dirt, noise, or disarray. Now he saw her as a frail woman content to do tiny things; to grow and cultivate small life that would not hurt her if it died: rhododendron, goldfish, dahlias, geraniums, imperial tulips. Because these little lives did die. The goldfish floated to the top of the water and when she tapped the side of the bowl with her fingernail they did not flash away in a lightning arc of terror. The rhododendron leaves grew wide and green and when their color was at its deepest and waxiest, they suddenly surrendered it and lapsed into limp yellow hearts. In a way she was jealous of death. Inside all that grief she felt when the doctor died, there had been a bit of pique too, as though he had chosen a more interesting subject than life—a more provocative companion than she was—and had deliberately followed death when it beckoned. She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity. Regardless of what Macon had done, she’d always suspected that the doctor didn’t have to die if he hadn’t wanted to. And it may have been that suspicion of personal failure and rejection (plus a smidgen of revenge against Macon) that made her lead her husband down paths from which there was no exit save violence. Lena thought Macon’s rages unaccountable. But Corinthians began to see a plan. To see how her mother had learned to bring her husband to a point, not of power (a nine-year-old girl could slap Ruth and get away with it), but of helplessness. She would begin by describing some incident in which she was a sort of honest buffoon. It began as a piece of pleasant dinner conversation, harmless on the surface because no one at the table was required to share her embarrassment; but all were able to admire her honesty and to laugh at her ignorance.
She had gone to the wedding of Mrs. Djvorak’s granddaughter. Anna Djvorak was an old Hungarian woman who had been one of her father’s patients. He’d had many working-class white patients and some middle-class white women who thought he was handsome. Anna Djvorak was convinced that the doctor had miraculously saved her son’s life by not sending him to the tuberculosis sanatorium back in 1903. Almost everybody who did go to the “san,” as they called it, died in it. Anna didn’t know that the doctor had no practicing privileges there, just as he had none at Mercy. Nor did she know that the cure for tuberculosis in 1903 was precisely the one most detrimental to the patients. All she knew was that the doctor had prescribed a certain diet, hours of rest to be rigidly adhered to, and cod-liver oil twice a day. The boy survived. It was natural that she would want the miracle doctor’s daughter at the wedding of this son’s youngest daughter. Ruth went and when the congregation went to the altar to receive the host, she went also. Kneeling there with her head bowed, she was not aware that the priest was left with the choice of placing the wafer on her hat or skipping her. He knew immediately that she was not Catholic since she did not raise her head at his words and push out her tongue for the wafer to be carefully placed there.
“Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi,” said the priest, and then, to her, a sharp whisper: “Ssss. Raise your head!” She looked up, saw the wafer and the acolyte holding a little silver tray under it. “Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam…” The priest held the host toward her and she opened her mouth.
Later, at the reception, the priest asked her point-blank whether she was Catholic.
“No. I’m Methodist,” she said.
“I see,” he said. “Well, the sacraments of the Church are reserved for—” Just the
n old Mrs. Djvorak interrupted him.
“Father,” she said, “I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter. Her father saved Ricky’s life. Ricky wouldn’t be here today if…”
Father Padrew smiled and shook Ruth’s hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Miss Foster.”
It was a simple occurrence, elaborately told. Lena listened and experienced each phrase of her mother’s emotion from religious ecstasy to innocent confidence to embarrassment. Corinthians listened analytically, expectantly—wondering how her mother would develop this anecdote into a situation in which Macon would either lash out at her verbally or hit her. Milkman was only half listening.
“‘Are you Catholic?’ he asked me. Well, I was embarrassed for a minute, but then I said, ‘No. I’m Methodist.’ And he started to tell me that only Catholics could take communion in a Catholic church. Well, I never heard of that. Anybody can take communion, I thought. At our church anybody can come up on the first Sunday. Well, before he could get it out, Anna came up and said, ‘Father, I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter.’ Well, the priest was all smiles then. And shook my hand and said he was very pleased and honored to make my acquaintance. So it all turned out all right. But honestly, I didn’t know. I went up there as innocent as a lamb.”
“You didn’t know that only Catholics take communion in a Catholic church?” Macon Dead asked her, his tone making it clear that he didn’t believe her.
“No, Macon. How would I know?”
“You see them put up their own school, keep their kids out of public schools, and you still think their religious stuff is open to anybody who wants to drop in?”
“Communion is communion.”
“You’re a silly woman.”
“Father Padrew didn’t think so.”
“You made a fool of yourself.”
“Mrs. Djvorak didn’t think so.”
“She was just trying to keep the wedding going, keep you from fucking it up.”