My rounds sure felt easier when people had the decency to stay blended. Now I started worrying over payer and nonpayers too. You know how it is, once a crowd splits into separate faces, nothing can ever mash them back into that first safe shape.
I was now reading books on ways to cultivate a positive manner, how to make strangers sort of do what you wanted. I learned many innocent jokes by heart. I grinned even more, I switched to plainer clothes—black and white—trying to prove I wasn’t all that flush myself. I shook the hands of bashful kids at all my Saturday homes. I taught these kids to holler—when I closed their front door—“After while, crocodile.” Somehow it sounded joyless. I perspired a lot. It was a scorching September. You can’t imagine the heat in some of my clients’ homes.
Once, a drunk husband, wanting the surance money for his booze, tried to take it back. His wife helped fight him off me. “Run,” she shouted my way. Pounding on her man’s shoulders, wedging herself between him and my getaway, she sobbed at his chest, “No! It for our funeral, baby. Don’t you hurt one flower on us two’s funeral. Do, baby, and you done seen the last of me.”
(I ASKED MYSELF: If life insurance is you betting on your own death—how much worse is the funeral kind?)
MRS. BATTLE OWED. A lot now. Owed me a lot. So did four others. By Christmas she was in to me for the most, to the tune of six dollars and some already. I’m sorry but during the Forties, to a kid in my bracket, six dollars meant something. I was getting in over my head. I knew it, but couldn’t seem to stop. I considered whining to Sam. But that would mean ratting on several of my older clients. The ones who’d paid the most over time, they had the most to lose. I felt I should protect her, especially. Mrs. Battle. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe because she never explained, never thanked me. She wouldn’t consider apologizing. A real aristocrat. Visiting her was like going to see some fine old Duchess in a book. At other homes I refused dandelion wine (in gallon jugs), five free wire-wheeled tires, one lewd offer from this old man in a kimono!, two dozen wonderful-smelling home-cured hams. I only accepted Mrs. Battle’s conversation and her green China tea. These soon seemed drudgery’s one dividend. I looked forward to her face at the door. We still waited for Pearl’s answer to my letters, we looked forward to Pearl’s checks. Some Saturdays I’d save Mrs. B’s house for last, like a reward, my commission.
Sam had tipped me off. “Once they smell heart on you, kid, you’re lost.” I wondered how heart would smell to a half-blind old woman. Like beef? Or bread. Or beer? Maybe vanilla extract. How?
ONE WINDY SATURDAY, walking through Mrs. Battle’s yard, I heard a creaking in her roadside sunflowers—I found a signboard hid among the leaves. The wooden plaque was teapot-shaped, two feet across. It’d been enameled pink, then painted over with many black crack-marks and the words “Can Fix.”
I wondered, What literate person had written those two words for her? Some child maybe. When I asked about the sign, she pointed to a red table set at the back of her kitchen. It was propped with glue pots, masking tape, brushes and—at the center—a little scaffolding of toothpicks, twigs, and Popsicle sticks. Some miniature ship seemed under construction but, holding my account book against my chest, I bent nearer and saw a fine old soup tureen. The thing looked imprisoned in its own splint. Hundreds of fissures had recently spoiled it, but each was now caked with white powdery stuff like a denture cream. Mrs. Battle, again startling me at how close she’d got so silently, explained: the porcelain paste, once dried and set, would wipe off with solvent. Someday, good as new. On the tureen’s side, an old woodland view was daubed, done fast but with great skill. Mrs. B. had set little support brads into its bowed porcelain. She’d hid metal clips right in the painted landscape; one paralleled a brown tree trunk. The brad’s blue metal looked just like the tree’s own shadow. You couldn’t separate VLB’s mending from the little ideal glade itself. I saw the beauty of the fixed tureen clearer than I would’ve noticed it, whole.
“It looks copa … terrif, really,” I said, standing. “But will it ever hold soup again?”
“What good’d it be otherwise, Assurance? Ain’t this for the soup?”
She seemed to consider mending a parlor game, said she’d learned it in a henhouse-workshop. A lady missionary, returned from China, taught local black girls this skill in the 18 and 70s. Final exam: You personally chose one hen’s egg and jumped on it, then you personally rebuilt it so it looked unbroken to the picky naked eye. Excellent training for the world.
As I sat having tea with Mrs. B, an overdressed white lady appeared, apologizing for “having barged in.” She handed over the dust of a ruined teacup. How ruined? It was in one of her husband’s letter-sized business envelopes!
“Ooh my my,” Mrs. B laughed dry but deep. “Somebody must’ve fell on this with both they boots.” “Yes,” the woman smiled my way. “I’m married to a man who doesn’t, shall we say? have the lightest touch on earth?—What would we do without her?” and nodded to our mutual friend who ignored this. I did too.
Mrs. Battle sat shaking the envelope. Listening to crumbled porcelain rattle, her face went dreamy as somebody eavesdropping on a conch shell’s pulse. “One big mess,” she said with relish. “Yes, well”—the customer turned to leave—“I admit as how this may finally be beyond even your skills, my dear. Even so, do have a go at it. Otherwise, I fear Mother’s service for twenty-four is totally useless. You’ll try? Good day, young man.” She nodded, maybe wondering if I’d brought VLB my busted fingerbowls. (Fat chance.) The lady stared like asking why a sternly dressed young gent should be here sipping tea midafternoon. But I saw she didn’t disapprove a bit. If anything her glance seemed jealous of VLB. So, we understood each other. Every Saturday for weeks after, I asked to see the progress of Mrs. Fancy Schmantsy’s cup.
First there were heaps of grit—then handle grit, side grit, bottom grit. Soon it became separate Wedgwood blue and white nuggets. Shaping from the bottom up, a roundness started showing—at its lower edges—the calm little sandals of picnicking gods and goddesses. I’d sometimes find Mrs. B using a magnifying glass big as Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s. She’d hold the cup not just near but practically against her face—pressed over her best eye the way you mash beefsteak there to prevent swelling. She had so little eyesight left, she seemed to feel this last amount might squeeze out as a bonding glue. Once, I planned to surprise her and I stole up from behind. I heard her whisper into the cup’s hollow like down some microphone, “Captain Wedgwood? Coming back to you senses? I setting up a meeting between you and Marse Earle Grey late next week. Won’t be long now.”
Uneasy, I tiptoed back out, lunged in again. “Assurance!”
The more relaxed I felt with her, the harder my job got. Friday night before collection mornings, I started having regular bad dreams. I saw myself turning roses into radishes. I kept shoving people off a high bridge. Mrs. Battle had fallen further and further behind. Three long-distance calls finally got me the Employment Office of the Ford Motor Co., Detroit. I asked after one Pearl Battle. They found four on their payroll; what was my Pearl’s middle name? I didn’t know but, wait, yes I did. “Vesta—either Pearl Vesta or Vesta Pearl. After six minutes of crackling long-distance time, (me paying, naturally, me sweating bullets), they came back, No Vesta Pearl or the other. “Did I say Vesta? Must be slipping. I meant ‘Lotte’ Pearl Battle or else ‘Pearl Lotte’ Battle. Hello?” The line was dead. Not sure why, I went out and got drunk for the first time ever and, knee-walking smashed, considered driving to Michigan to find my favorite’s favorite daughter.
One evening, pitifully sober, headed home after my last Saturday collection (some nights it took till ten), I motored along Summit Avenue, our town’s richest white street. Boys I’d known at high school were out playing basketball. They were my age, lawyers’ and dentists’ sons home for Christmas break, back from freshman year at Duke, Carolina, Princeton. One goal was mounted over the big home’s back door, another hung above its three-car garage. T
his morning when I rode by, bound for Baby Africa, the same guys had been playing.—Now parked nearby, I slunk low in my car, headlights doused, my windows down. I sat listening to their ball pinging in that clean trusty way basketballs do. It was so dark you wondered how players could see the goal but you still heard the swish of the net, point, point. Guys horsed around; one yodeled, “Glad I back in de land ob cotton, your feet stink and mine is rotten, look away …” They called each other butter-fingers, cross-eyed, air-brain. I just sat. Lamps were being lit inside the three-storied house. Then the mother of the place turned on a back-porch light and appeared carrying sandwiches and bottled sodas on a silver tray. She left this and—without a word—slipped indoors. All day these guys’d been here doing this.
I rolled up my window. I envied them but pitied them but mostly envied them. I drove off, slower than usual. I felt like crying. I wouldn’t let myself. It seemed a luxury people like me couldn’t afford.
I VISITED my night school’s tuition office. I asked for a payment extension. Six weeks only. It wouldn’t happen again. I blamed family problems. That seemed true. I was paying Dad’s extra medical bills, paying for household food, plus funding the upcoming funerals of four black strangers, along with one ninety-some-year-old near-stranger. (“If they’d just hurry up and keel over while I’m supporting them, they’d all get the red-carpet treatment.”)
I lied for them. I paid. And this stupid generosity made me feel ashamed, not good like it’s supposed to. I told myself, “You’re just too weak to give her up. No Princeton pre-law ballplayer would be such a sap. You’re helping losers, clod, because you are one.”
THE WEDGWOOD CUP, week to week, healed like a stupid perfect little garden vegetable on her second kitchen table. Then one day it was gone. I missed it. Back it went to its home set, and another white person’s porcelain disaster took its place. I wondered what Mrs. ? charged these country clubbers. Not enough, I guesssed. She needed a manager.
Payment-wise, she had slipped further behind, no word from Pearl. I wondered if she’d made Pearl up. I knew better and felt ashamed, but even so … And yet, grouchy as I felt, I still sort of leaned toward having my tea with her. The kids at VLB’s place usually behaved and often seemed funny, noisy in a good way. I decided not to mention how much Vesta Lotte Battle owed, not till the end of today’s visit. That’d spare us both some embarrassment. While driving to her place, I’d mapped out my speech and tactics. But once arrived, there was something about her emptied necklace, the brocade bolsters sewn shut with clear fishing line. There was something about how the children at her house tried cleaning up after themselves and looked out for each other and her. Some Saturdays when she called me “Boy Assurance,” I believed her. I wanted to. I called her “Vesta Lotte Battle” to her face and in my head. The name started sounding classic and someway fertile. But, hey, eventually, I had to bring it up—I mean the money.
“Look, did Pearl let you know yet? I told her to write you here.”
Mrs. B sat rocking somebody else’s sick baby. Seven older kids—all quiet, groggy-acting, maybe with fevers?—rested in sweet lost heaps around the room. My client hadn’t answered me.
“Well? Are you planning to speak? I’m sorry but I’m getting cross here. I am. And who can blame me? It’s January already. No word from Detroit?”
The blue-black head wagged sideways.
“Mrs. Battle, with all due respect, I earn about two dollars and eighty cents per Saturday doing this. A lot of it’s going to you. I’ve cut off some of the others. You not. But it’s plain. I can’t keep this up much longer, right? I mean I’ve carried you—week by week, I have. It hurts me but I can’t … much longer.”
“You ain’t got to.”
Rocking the borrowed baby, she just looked at me. She said this. The thing was, she meant it. Maybe that’s what always made me feel so bad. If I did drop her from the rolls, she wouldn’t hold it against me. That was the absolute killer.
“Well, I know I don’t have to. Not by law, I don’t.”
I stood before her chair, hoping she might at least offer me some tea. “But, Mrs. B, you’d lose your life savings. And that’s taken you your whole life to save up, right, ma’am?”
She sat rocking, eyes aimed past me.
She seemed so unlike the others, unlike any person I’ve met since. How can I explain it to you? I want to. My other clients often faked long hunts for coins they knew weren’t there. (Try and imagine the agony of standing before a wheelchair where an old lady in a cowgirl hat is going through every pocket of her housedress ten times while you wait, looking hopeful—trying to.) Clients would hide inside their homes. I’d peek through a window and notice six adults and two children lying face-up on the floor. Caught, they’d grin, then all fake napping. “Hi. I see you,” I’d say. “Please.” You would not believe the hassles, sob stories, and runarounds I got each Saturday.
It’s why I loved coming here. Mrs. Battle never blamed me for inventing the rigged setup. If all five of her policies got revoked, I knew she wouldn’t fault me. (She hadn’t even blamed me when I chose to take her payments on myself.) Today I understood, it was, from the start, my own doing, not hers.
Odd: standing before her chair, furious at our situation—meaning furious at her—I found myself wondering how Mrs. B must have looked when she was, say, my age. By now she had nothing left but this unexplainable … power, I’ll call it. (Where do such put-upon people learn such pride?) Was it something time had done to her? Did it come because she knew so much, or did she understand very little but in a deep deep way? I have never bought the stuff about all old people being wise. You don’t get Wisdom with your first Social Security check. I mean, here I am, near the brink of sixty and still waiting for the old light bulb to snap on overhead. That day, I saw: nothing was left her but a raw, quiet sureness. Mostly blind, stripped down to vitals, she could now take anything that came. Ninety-some, she’d finally got fairly limber. She could dodge it all. She could even take losing everything on my account. For that reason, I just would not permit it. No.
There was something about the old woman—I’m not sure that I can explain it or, if I do, that you’ll believe me. Mrs. Battle had some kind of stature or something. I mean, aren’t there people—maybe Churchill or Roosevelt maybe—who’re lit up with a cranky kind of genius that everybody, even their own enemies, respects? True, I’d never seen Vesta Lotte Battle do all that much. She never saved the Free World or anything like that. Yeah, she once gave me shelter during a downpour, she mended collectors’ item china practically for free, she let neighbor kids hang out at her house and make candy. She knew how to change a tire. So what? Most days she just sat in this rocker, rocking, looking out at a view on noplace. It galled me, standing here, waiting: I thought, almost envious, why should it be one old black woman? Aren’t I crazy to consider that she knows this much? I must be insane to feel so much because of her. I must be making this up.
Still, right along, I was positive about it. I still am. That’s why I’m bothering to tell this. Her? she knew. It was less anything she did or said, more who she was, I guess. She’d never seen the ocean, a hundred and ten miles from Falls. And yet, you just felt her life. Felt it go right into your own. You were helpless. Instantly you couldn’t separate. You walked into the room and it was like that stove of hers burning when I met her in July. Her life stayed closer to the skin than most people’s.
PART OF what I’m saying is: It seemed unbelievable that such a woman couldn’t come up with fifty cents a week.
SHE NOW ASKED would I go make our tea? Today she had a lapful. I did. I found I knew where she stored everything. I noted a ruined gravy boat, trying to regroup itself inside her toothpick bracings. For a second, putting water on to boil, I closed my eyes, imagining blindness—imagining her blindness. I admired how she managed to fake vision. She really looked right at you. Odd I’d never noticed any food in her kitchen, nothing but sugar and cream for my tea, nothing past candy maki
ngs for her kids. Did she live on tea, on whatever nourishment seeped into her mended cup from all the glue that held the thing together?
I brought Mrs. B her own best one-of-a-kind cup, laurel and nasturtiums painted around it. I was pouring tea as she started talking about slave days. Uh oh. I saw her start relaxing back back into being blind. She finally trusted me enough to let me see she couldn’t see. “This is a trick!” something told me. I knew I shouldn’t listen. I imagined Sam scolding me, “Jesus, kid, you just ask for trouble, you know that? Rule Numero Uno is: always think of your assigned list as the group. Group life, ever heard of it? Then everything’ll go down easy as Jack Daniel’s. But when you start slipping, start thinking, ‘There’s this man and that woman,’ then they’ll really nail you, son. They know this, they plan it.” I shouldn’t pay attention. History’d only make me feel worse, her history would. And yet here she was, cradling the kid in one arm, using her free hand to hold a teacup to her mouth. (It now seemed blind too). Between sips, she slowly told. (What was I going to do? mash my hand over her three-toothed mouth? What, was I going to run away or what?) Despising my own politeness, I settled cross-legged on plank flooring beside her busy rocker; the brocade and cinder-block chaise was too far off. OK, but I’d just fake listening.
She’d been born the property of our local mill-owning family. She said she’d got freed while still a child. The day after Sherman marched through our county, burning things, freed slaves killed all the plantation’s livestock. The old groom cut the throats of two white Arabian horses he’d curried and exercised daily. Then, knife in hand, he stood over them, crying, “What else do I got?” She remembered everybody’s dancing by torchlight in the Quarter. Ex-slaves raided their mistress’s closets, wore all her gowns. Some of the funny little boys dressed up, tripping on hems. Freed slaves held a Harvest Ball in April, a candlelight party like ones that’d lit the big house before the War. That first night of freedom, three older men asked Vesta Lotte to marry them. Freed, she now felt free to say No three times running. She was eight.