“Don’t you mean ‘Yes’?”
Like the kitchen below, this room was overbright, like a department store. Every lamp—six? ten?—was on, rivaling the chandelier. Mounting the unlit stairs, glancing over her shoulder, Junior had to guess what the other rooms might hold. It seemed to her that each woman lived in a spotlight separated—or connected—by the darkness between them. Staring openly at the items crowding the surfaces of tables, desks, she waited for the little woman to break the silence.
“I’m Heed Cosey. And you are?”
“Junior. But you can call me June.”
“Oh, dear,” said Heed, and batted her lashes as if someone had spilled red wine on pale velvet: sorry, of course, and no fault, of course, but difficult to clean nonetheless. Moving away from the window, she had to step carefully, so full was the room with furniture. A chaise, two dressers, two writing tables, side tables, chairs high-backed and low-seated. All under the influence of a bed behind which a man’s portrait loomed. Heed sat down finally at a small desk. Placing her hands in her lap, she nodded for the girl to take the facing chair.
“Tell me where you have worked before. The notice didn’t specify a resume, but I need to know your work history.”
Junior smiled. The woman pronounced “resume” with two syllables. “I’m eighteen and can do anything you want. Anything.”
“That’s good to know, but references? Do you have any? Someone I can get in touch with?”
“Nope.”
“Well how will I know you are honest? Discreet?”
“A letter won’t tell you even if it says so. I say I am. Hire me and you’ll see. If I’m not good enough—” Junior turned her palms up.
Heed touched the corners of her lips with a hand small as a child’s and crooked as a wing. She considered her instant dislike of the Junior-but-you-can-call-me-June person slouching in front of her and thought that her blunt speech, while not a pose, was something of an act. She considered something else too: whether the girl’s attitude had staying power. She needed someone who could be coaxed into things or who already had a certain hunger. The situation was becoming urgent. Christine, true to her whore’s heart, sporting diamonds in their rightful owner’s face, was pilfering house money to pay a lawyer.
“Let me tell you what this job calls for. The duties, I mean.”
“Go ahead.” Junior shouldered out of her jacket, the cheap leather mewing. Under it, her black T-shirt gave no support to her breasts, but it was clear to Heed that they didn’t need any: the nipples were high, martial. With the jacket off, her hair seemed to spring into view. Layers of corkscrews, parted in the middle, glinted jet in the lamplight.
“I’m writing a book,” said Heed, a smile of satisfaction lighting her face. The posture she’d assumed to manage the interview changed with the mention of her book. “It’s about my family. The Coseys. My husband’s family.”
Junior looked at the portrait. “That him?”
“That’s him. It was painted from a snapshot, so it’s exactly like him. What you see there is a wonderful man.” Heed sighed. “Now I got all the material, but some things need checking, you know. Dates, spellings. I got each guest book from our hotel—except for two or three, I think—and some of those people, not many but some, had the worse handwriting. The worse. But most folks I seen had perfect hands, you know, because that’s the way we was taught. But Papa didn’t let them print it the way they do now, right alongside the signature. Didn’t need to anyway, because he knowed everybody who was anybody and could recognize a signature even if it was a X, but no X-type people came, of course. Our guests, most of them, had gorgeous handwriting because, between you and I, you had to be more than just literate, you had to have a position, an accomplishment, understand? You couldn’t achieve nothing worthwhile if your handwriting was low. Nowadays people write with they feet.”
Heed laughed, then said, “Excuse me. You have no idea, do you, what I’m talking about. I get excited is all, just thinking about it.” She adjusted the lapels of her housecoat with her thumbs, readdressing herself to the interview. “But I want to hear about you. ‘Junior,’ you said?”
“Yeah.”
“Well now, Junior. You said you can do anything I want, so you must have worked somewhere before. If you’re going to help me with my book I need to know—”
“Look, Mrs. Cosey. I can read; I can write, okay? I’m as smart as it gets. You want handwriting, you want typing, I’ll do it. You want your hair fixed, I’ll fix it. You want a bath, I’ll give you one. I need a job and I need a place to stay. I’m real good, Mrs. Cosey. Really real good.” She winked, startling Heed into a momentary recall of something just out of reach, like a shell snatched away by a wave. It may have been that flick of melancholy so sharply felt that made her lean close to the girl and whisper,
“Can you keep a secret?” She held her breath.
“Like nobody you ever knew.”
Heed exhaled. “Because the work is private. Nobody can know about it. Not nobody.”
“You mean Christine?”
“I mean nobody.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You don’t even know what the pay is.”
“I’ll take the job. You’ll pay. Should I start now or wait till tomorrow?”
Footsteps, slow and rhythmic, sounded in the hall.
“Tomorrow,” Heed said. She whispered the word, but it had the urgency of a shout.
Christine entered carrying a tray. No knock preceded her and no word accompanied her. She placed the tray on the desk where Heed and Junior faced each other and left without meeting a single eye.
Heed lifted the casserole lid, then replaced it. “Anything to annoy me,” she said.
“Looks delicious,” said Junior.
“Then you eat it,” said Heed.
Junior forked a shrimp into her mouth and moaned, “Mmmm, God, she sure knows how to cook.”
“What she knows is, I don’t eat shellfish.”
The second floor had none of the fussy comfort Junior found on the third. Here a hallway, two plain bedrooms, a kind of office, and a bathroom equaled the entire square footage of the room above, where Junior had spent two hours trying to read the woman who was now her boss.
It should not have taken that long but the taste of hot, home-cooked food so distracted her that she forgot. She was near the end of a second helping before she began to watch for the face behind the face; and to listen for the words hiding behind talk. It was Heed’s fork play that finally pulled Junior’s attention away from her own plate. Holding the fork between thumb and palm, driving leaves of Boston lettuce around oil and vinegar, piercing olives, lifting rings of onion on tines only to let them drop again and again, Heed had chattered on, eating nothing. Junior fixed on the hands more than on what occupied them: small, baby-smooth except for one scarred spot, each one curved gently away from its partner—like fins. Arthritis? she wondered. Is that why she can’t write her own book? Or some other old-lady sickness? Memory loss, maybe. Even before the food arrived she had heard the change in Heed’s speech, the slow move away from the classroom to the girls’ locker; from a principal’s office to a neighborhood bar.
Yawning under blankets in the bed to which Heed had directed her, Junior fought sleep to organize, recapture her impressions. She knew she had eaten too much too quickly, as in her first days at Correctional before she learned how to make food last. And just as it had been there, she was already ready for more. Her appetite had not surprised her—it was permanent—but its ferocity had. Watching the gray-eyed Christine cleaning shrimp earlier, she had leashed it and had no trouble figuring out that a servant who cooked with twelve diamond rings on her fingers would enjoy—maybe even need—a little sucking up to. And although she had caught the other one’s pose as well and recognized it from the start as a warden’s righteous shield, Junior hoped that some up-front sass would crack it. Still, gobbling real food after days of clean garbage and public filch, she had
let her antennae droop. As now, when sleep—alone, in silence, in total darkness at last—overwhelmed caution for pleasure. Simply not having a toilet in the room where you slept was a thrill. The bath she craved had to be postponed. When Heed said the weather was too nasty, the bus depot too far, and why not spend the night and collect your things tomorrow? Junior thought immediately of a solitary soak in a real tub with a perfumed bar of colored soap. But the water she heard running through pipes above reduced the tap flow in the second-floor bathtub to a sigh. Heed had beat her to it, so Junior spent a few minutes rummaging in the closet, where she found a helmet, one can of tomato paste, two rock-hard sacks of sugar, a jar of Jergens hand cream, a tin of sardines, a milk bottle full of keys, and two locked suitcases. She gave up trying to force the locks and undressed. After massaging her feet, she slid under the covers with two days’ worth of dirt on hold.
Sleep came down so fast it was only in dreaming that she felt the peculiar new thing: protected. A faint trace of relief, as in the early days at Correctional when the nights were so terrifying; when upright snakes on tiny feet lay in wait, their thin green tongues begging her to come down from the tree. Once in a while there was someone beneath the branches standing apart from the snakes, and although she could not see who it was, his being there implied rescue. So she had endured the nightmares, even entered them, for a glimpse of the stranger’s face. She never saw it, and eventually he disappeared along with the upright snakes. But here, now, deep in sleep, her search seemed to have ended. The face hanging over her new boss’s bed must have started it. A handsome man with a G.I. Joe chin and a reassuring smile that pledged endless days of hot, tasty food; kind eyes that promised to hold a girl steady on his shoulder while she robbed apples from the highest branch.
2
FRIEND
Vida set up the ironing board. Why the hospital had cut out the laundry service for everybody except “critical staff”—doctors, nurses, lab technicians—she couldn’t fathom. Now the janitors, food handlers, as well as the aides like herself, had to wash and press their own uniforms, reminding her of the cannery before Bill Cosey hired her away for the first work she ever had that required hosiery. She wore hose at the hospital, of course, but it was thick, white. Not the sheer, feminine ones preferred behind the receptionist’s desk at Cosey’s Hotel. Plus a really good dress, good enough for church. It was Bill Cosey who paid for two more, so she would have a change and the guests wouldn’t confuse the wearing of one dress as a uniform. Vida thought he would deduct the cost from her pay, but he never did. His pleasure was in pleasing. “The best good time,” he used to say. That was the resort’s motto and what he promised every guest: “The best good time this side of the law.” Vida’s memories of working there merged with her childhood recollections of the hotel when famous people kept coming back. Even disturbances in the service or drowning accidents didn’t dissuade them from extending their stay or returning the next year. All because of the beaming Bill Cosey and the wide hospitality his place was known for. His laugh, his embracing arm, his instinctive knowledge of his guests’ needs smoothed over every crack or stumble, from an overheard argument among staff or a silly, overbearing wife—ignorant as a plate—to petty theft and a broken ceiling fan. Bill Cosey’s charm and L’s food won out. When the lamps ringing the dance floor were rocking in ocean air; when the band warmed up and the women appeared, dressed in moiré and chiffon and trailing jasmine scent in their wake; when the men with beautiful shoes and perfect creases in their linen trousers held chairs for the women so they could sit knee to knee at the little tables, then a missing saltcellar or harsh words exchanged much too near the public didn’t matter. Partners swayed under the stars and didn’t mind overlong intermissions because ocean breeze kept them happier and kinder than their cocktails. Later in the evening—when those who were not playing whist were telling big lies in the bar; when couples were sneaking off in the dark—the remaining dancers would do steps with outrageous names, names musicians made up to control, confuse, and excite their audiences all at the same time.
Vida believed she was a practical woman with as much sense as heart, more wary than dreamy. Yet she squeezed only sweetness from those nine years, beginning right after the birth of her only child, Dolly, in 1962. The decline under way even then was kept invisible until it was impossible to hide. Then Bill Cosey died and the Cosey girls fought over his coffin. Once again L restored order, just as she always had. Two words hissed into their faces stopped them cold. Christine closed the switchblade; Heed picked up her ridiculous hat and moved to the other side of the grave. Standing there, one to the right, one to the left, of Bill Cosey’s casket, their faces, as different as honey from soot, looked identical. Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s. After that nobody could doubt the best good times were as dead as he was. If Heed had any notion of remaking the place into what it had been when Vida was a little Up Beach girl, she was quickly disabused of it when L quit that very day. She lifted a lily from the funeral spray and never set foot in the hotel again—not even to pack, collect her chef’s hat or her white oxfords. In Sunday shoes with two-inch heels she walked from the cemetery all the way to Up Beach, claimed her mother’s shack, and moved in. Heed did what she had to and what she could to keep it going, but a sixteen-year-old disc jockey working a tape player appealed only to locals. No one with real money would travel distance to hear it, would book a room to listen to the doo-wop tunes they had at home; would seek an open-air dance floor crowded with teenagers doing dances they never heard of and couldn’t manage anyway. Especially if the meals, the service, the bed linen had to strain for an elegance unnoticed and unappreciated by the new crowd.
Vida slid the iron’s nose around the buttons, frustrated once more by the slot in the metal that some male idiot thought would actually work. The same fool who believed a three-ounce iron was better than a heavy one. Lighter, yes, but it didn’t iron anything that needed it, just things you could unwrinkle with your own warm hands: T-shirts, towels, cheap pillowcases. But not a good cotton uniform with twelve buttons, two cuffs, four pockets, and a collar that was not a lazy extension of the lapels. This was what she had come to? Vida knew she was lucky to have the hospital job. Slight as it was, her paycheck had helped fill her house with the sounds of gently helpful bells: time up in the microwave oven, the washing cycle, the spin dryer; watch out, there’s smoke somewhere, the phone’s off the hook. Lights glowed when coffee brewed, toast toasted, and the iron was hot. But the good fortune of her current job did not prevent her from preferring the long-ago one that paid less in every way but satisfaction. Cosey’s Resort was more than a playground; it was a school and a haven where people debated death in the cities, murder in Mississippi, and what they planned to do about it other than grieve and stare at their children. Then the music started, convincing them they could manage it all and last.
She hung on, Heed did. Allow her that credit, but none other to a woman who gave torn towels and sheets to a flooded-out family instead of money. For years before Cosey actually died, while he aged and lost interest in everything but Nat Cole and Wild Turkey, Heed paraded around like an ignorant version of Scarlett O’Hara—refusing advice, firing the loyal, hiring the trifling, and fighting May, who was the one who really threatened her air supply. She couldn’t fire her stepdaughter while Cosey was alive, even if he spent most days fishing and most nights harmonizing with tipsy friends. For it came to that: a commanding, beautiful man surrendering to feuding women, letting them ruin all he had built. How could they do that, Vida wondered. How could they let gangster types, dayworkers, cannery scum, and payday migrants in there, dragging police attention along with them like a tail? Vida had wanted to blame the increasingly raggedy clientele for May’s kleptomania—Lord knows what those dayworkers took home—but May had been stealing even before Vida was hired and long before the quality of the guests changed. In fact, her second day at w
ork, standing behind the desk, was marked by May’s habit. A family of four from Ohio was checking in. Vida opened the registration book. The date, last name, and room number were neatly printed on the left, a space on the right for the guest’s signature. Vida reached toward a marble pen stand but found no pen there or anywhere near. Flustered, she rummaged in a drawer. Heed arrived just as she was about to hand the father a pencil.
“What’s that? You giving him a pencil?”
“The pen is missing, ma’am.”
“It can’t be. Look again.”
“I have. It’s not here.”
“Did you look in your pocketbook?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your coat pocket, maybe?” Heed glanced at the guests and produced a resigned smile, as if they all understood the burdens of inadequate help. Vida was seventeen years old and a new mother. The position Mr. Cosey had given her was a high and, she hoped, permanent leap out of the fish trough where she used to work and her husband still did. Her mouth went dry and her fingers shook as Heed confronted her. Tears were marshaling to humiliate her further when rescue arrived, wearing a puffy white chef’s hat. She held the fountain pen in her hand; stuck it in the holder, and, turning to Heed, said, “May. As you well know.”
That’s when Vida knew she had more to learn than registering guests and handling money. As in any workplace, there were old alliances here; mysterious battles, pathetic victories. Mr. Cosey was royal; L, the woman in the chef’s hat, priestly. All the rest—Heed, Vida, May, waiters, cleaners—were court personnel fighting for the prince’s smile.
She had surprised herself at the supper table, bringing up that old gossip about Cosey’s death. Hating gossip bred of envy, she wanted to believe what the doctor said: heart attack. Or what L said: heartache. Or even what May said: school busing. Certainly not what his enemies said: syphilis rampant. Sandler said eighty-one years was enough; Bill Cosey was simply tired. But Vida had seen the water cloud before he drank it and his reach not to his chest, where the heart exploded, but to his stomach. Yet those who might have wanted him dead—Christine, a husband or two, and a few white businessmen—were nowhere near. Just her, L, and one waiter. Lord, what a mess. A dying body moves, thrashes against that sleep. Then there was Heed screaming like a maniac. May running off to the Monarch Street house and locking herself in a closet. Had it not been for L, the county’s role model would never have gotten the dignified funeral he deserved. Even when Christine and Heed almost trashed it at the end, L stepped between those rigid vipers, forcing them to bite back their tongues. Which, by all reports, they were still doing, while waiting for the other one to die. So the girl Sandler directed to their house must be related to Heed. She was the only one with living family. With five brothers and three sisters there could be fifty nieces. Or maybe she wasn’t a relative at all. Vida decided to ask Romen to find out—discreetly, if he could; otherwise directly, although there was little hope of a reliable answer from him. The boy was so inattentive these days, so moody. A furlough for one of his parents right about now would be welcome, before he got into trouble neither she nor Sandler could handle. His hands hadn’t gotten that way from yard work. He beat somebody. Bad.