“They’re crazy! And anyway Betty has always been jealous of Maureen, you know that.”
“If she had money, why would she hide it? Why hide it all?” “Sure, why hide it?” Loretta said quickly. “Kids don’t hide money. It isn’t natural. I know Betty is getting money from somewhere but she won’t let on. I’m through with her. She spends it right away on clothes and junk. In fact, her and that nigger bitch are going to buy a motor scooter—how the hell do you like that? It’s going to look nice, my daughter riding around with a nigger on a scooter! But kids all spend money right away, Reeny wouldn’t be any different. No, it was his money all along and he got drunk and tried to blame it on Maureen because they never did get along. He was jealous of her and you too, because of me…he knew I loved my kids more than I did him and that used to drive him wild. No, she wasn’t doing that. Christ, if I thought—”
“Okay, Ma.”
“A prostitute—”
“Okay.”
“Don’t listen to what they say back in the old neighborhood. They shoot their mouths off all the time. I’ll be glad when it’s all torn down, then those fat bitches won’t be able to stand around gabbing about people’s troubles…I’ll be glad when they dig out for the expressway right through it, those goddam drunk Irish anyway! Half of them are nuts. The niggers are moving in from down town and the Mexicans from the other side, so it’s going to be a hot time one of these days. Who do you hang around with from back there? That Ramie Malone?”
“I don’t hang around with him or anybody.”
“Who are your friends now, Jules?”
“I didn’t come over to talk about them.”
“Jules—”
“Can I talk to Maureen?”
Loretta looked sadly at him. After a while she said, “Sure. But watch this kid, will you? I mean, if he rolls over or anything.” She put the baby back in the crib; it was neither awake nor asleep. It had a plump, dopey face, with surprised tufts of hair on its head. Jules thought her request was strange, that he should watch over the baby though she was only going to look in Maureen’s room—was everything so precarious to her now? She had seemed so reasonable all this time.
She got up and went into the other room. Jules, uncomfortable, looked into the baby’s face. Furlong’s baby. Left behind for Loretta to raise. It slept and took in nourishment and even had a name—Randolph—and was much heavier than it had been the last time he’d seen it; so many babies being born! On his way to this dump of a building he had seen a Negro girl of about fifteen chatting with two Negro boys, toeing the sidewalk, passing the time of day, the boys with big knowing eyes and wild hair and the girl with a dark merry face, about seven months pregnant, just passing the time of day out on the street. His mother’s remark about women getting pregnant at the state hospital had startled him. He had never heard that. He’d heard plenty of other things about that place and about the various jails, but he had never heard that. One time, put in Children’s Shelter overnight, he had gone through something terrible and he did not often let himself think about it, and he was a boy, a boy. What might happen to a girl he did not want to think about either. Enough had happened to Maureen already.
Loretta leaned around the door. “Okay,” she said. “Come on in. She wants to see you.”
The room was a shock to him: peeling wallpaper, plaster fallen out in queer patches, a light bulb fixed in a socket overhead. He felt suddenly very warm. Maureen, sitting up in bed, staring toward him, was also a shock.
“Hi, Maureen,” Jules said. He held out the pot of flowers to her. When she gave no sign of noticing them he set them on the window sill. “How are you?”
She stared at him. She was sitting up, propped against a pillow. The covers were drawn up around her though the room was warm. Her hair had grown long and straggly, worse than the hair he saw on broken-down women in the city, and her face had a puffed, plump, shiny look to it. It had been about a month since he’d seen her last and in that short time she had put on a lot of weight.
“She feels fine,” Loretta said.
Loretta hovered behind him, moving the flowerpot on the sill. She went to the foot of the bed and tugged at the covers, trying to make them even. “Sit down, Jules, take a load off your feet,” she said, giving him a poke.
Jules sat on the window sill. He looked toward his sister and tried to smile. Maureen was fumbling with something—not fumbling but just working her fingers on the edge of the blanket. Her fingers moved nervously but she herself was not nervous. She stared at him in a sleepy, steady way, unsurprised but rather cautious. He might have recognized her had he seen her out on the street, but maybe not.
“It’s a real nice day today, you should come outside,” Jules said. “I’m going to buy a car with a top that comes down—”
“A convertible!” Loretta said, poking him again—he shouldn’t talk down to Maureen. “Isn’t that nice, Reeny? You always liked to go for rides. When it gets warmer he can take you out, huh?”
Maureen’s eyelashes seemed to flutter, yet she was not responding to her mother or to Jules. They waited, but nothing happened. She looked down at her fingers. Her face, once very pretty, was now gross and blemished; blotches had come out on her forehead and cheeks. On her left cheek was a rash of pimples that was nearly solid. Jules stared at her and could not look away.
“Say something, talk, tell her about yourself,” Loretta said. “Tell her about driving down to St. Louis.”
“Yes, I’m driving somebody down to St. Louis. It’s a job. I’m driving a man who’s in business down there,” Jules said hollowly. “I mean, he’s in business up here and needs to meet with someone down there…he’s paying me a lot…he won’t ride on planes or trains…and…and he’s paying me a lot.” He stared at Maureen, and she looked toward him, but their eyes did not meet. He felt as if he were on the brink of a terrible revelation. Suddenly trembling, he felt for his wallet. It was there. He was relieved that he hadn’t lost it, that somebody hadn’t picked it out of his pocket.
“I don’t want to forget to give you something,” he said awkwardly. He looked through the wallet. “You could probably use a little money….Do you like this new place? The apartment?”
“It’s okay,” Loretta said.
“Why’d you move here, this particular place?”
“To be nearer downtown, nearer the welfare place. You got to go down there and argue with them, you know….”
“It isn’t dangerous around here?”
Loretta made a snorting, contemptuous noise. “You know what Detroit is,” she said, laughing.
Jules tried to smile. He thought instead of this dump being broken open and the furniture in it—moved over the years from place to place, faithfully—stolen by Negroes and hillbillies, and Loretta would do nothing about it, wouldn’t even notice.
“How do they treat you at welfare?” Jules said.
“It depends if you get a bitch or not. Some of the guys are okay. I can handle them. You just get there early and wait in line. But this one fat guy, he wears sunglasses out on the job and is real sharp—he can trip you up on the price of shampoo and what’s on sale at Kroger’s this week. He asked me why I needed razor blades, who’s in the family to use them, he said. Is there a man in the family not reported? The smart-ass bastard, I don’t know if he was kidding or not. You got to be careful with them, joking with them. The joke always stops sometime.”
Jules was nervously taking bills out of his wallet.
“I could maybe use a little something. Till next week,” Loretta whispered.
She was shy: it was against welfare regulations for her to accept any money unless she reported it.
“You got enough for food? What’s the rent here?”
“I could use a little,” Loretta said, urgent and embarrassed.
He took a handful of bills out. He would have liked to shake them under Maureen’s nose, to wake he
r up. Didn’t you do it for money? Didn’t you? And now you’re turning backwards into a saint, a pig of a saint…But Maureen noticed nothing. Her eyes were large and drugged. He could not believe, glancing at this heavy, ugly girl, that she was the same girl who had been his sister. “Here, Ma,” Jules said, handing her the money.
She took it from him and put it in her dress pocket, quickly. The transaction left them both breathless and a little ashamed.
“I got to answer all kinds of questions about you down there,” Loretta said. “He wants to know how much you make. I told him you didn’t come around, you left home and never bothered with us. Everybody says that, you know—I mean, all the mothers with kids bringing in money, as long as they don’t live at home. They know you got a police record so they believe it. Well, kid, thanks a lot. I really mean it.”
Maureen sat without moving. Only her fingers moved on the edge of the blanket. She might have been waiting for them both to go away.
“You want some coffee cake and some more coffee, Jules?”
Loretta said. “Reeny and I usually have something to eat around now, doughnuts or something.”
“I better be going.”
“So soon?”
“I got to meet someone at noon.”
“Let me get you something, it won’t take a minute.”
She went out, and he was left alone. He felt alone in the room, unwatched. Maureen did not see him and he could not bring himself to look at her any longer. His body felt unclean. His clothes were damp from perspiration. He thought of Maureen bloody and unconscious, and he thought about himself that night in Children’s Shelter, where he’d been fooling around to show that he wasn’t afraid, and all that punkish joyful violence had turned around on him…three kids had cornered him in a lavatory, drawn by his showing off…and so…they had slashed his arm with some glass, but that wasn’t the part that sickened him…anyway it was over. He thought of Maureen in the hospital, with her blackened eyes and a large yellow swelling on her forehead, a rotten yellow. He thought of her teeth edged with blood. Furlong had really beaten her up and must have been trying to kill her. Now he was in jail for four months. Jules felt a terrible anger rise in him, a sense of madness—in four months that man would be out! He pressed his hands against his eyes, kneading them. He thought of Furlong and he thought of his own father, mixing the two together. He thought of the Children’s Shelter, all those whining, whimpering, snot-nosed kids; he thought of himself prancing among them and showing off and of what they had done to him…
He jerked around, repulsed by the memory. But Maureen gave no sign of noticing him.
Loretta came back with a cheerful smile and offered him some coffee cake. He shook his head no, feeling weak, and this weakness increased when he saw how greedily Maureen reached out for some coffee cake and how quickly she ate it. No, he wasn’t going to sit here and watch her eat, not like that. He couldn’t take it. Blundering backward, fixing his face in a bright awful smile, he said good-by to them and he’d be back soon and bring them a little money.
Loretta followed him out. She said anxiously in a low voice, “You take care of yourself, Jules. Don’t worry about her. She has such a good appetite, that’s a good sign. Some of them, when they get like this, you know, they have to be fed by tubes and things, by needles, and they get all skin and bones and weak and that’s very bad, but Reeny eats everything I give her—”
“That’s good,” Jules said.
He escaped.
2
The car wasn’t his but belonged to a man named Bernard, whom he had met through Faye.
Sitting up in his mother’s smelly flat had made him feel rocky, and now he drove aimlessly around, staring at the unfamiliar buildings and houses. Gangs of kids were playing out on the street. White and Negro, mixed. More Negro. Jules could remember having been a kid who played in the street but the memory was from the outside, as if he’d seen himself playing and the memory had stuck to him, photographed.
So she had a good appetite, which was a good sign…
The weather should have been mild, but its mildness was oppressive; bits of soot fell against the windshield of the car. Jules had had the car washed just recently. He felt as if he himself were being soiled. Faye was a fastidious woman, fastidious about her body. He could remember Maureen making supper, working with food, rinsing food off dishes after supper, cleaning up, wiping up, her face slightly flushed and content.
He needed to buoy himself up. He needed to get high on driving this excellent car, and the jumble of Detroit and the anticipation of the drive he’d be setting out on that evening should have done it but somehow failed, something in him was sinking lower, lower…He could smell Detroit about him, a kind of sink hole, a hole with a horizon, into which stagnant sulphurous-smelling water seeped. Impossible to believe he’d ever lived elsewhere! Maybe he’d dreamed of the countryside? A ramshackle house drafty as a barn and behind it were actual barns, rotted, ready to collapse, one of them partly burned and smelling of fire that entered Jules’s nostrils like a charge of adrenaline.
Fire burns and does its duty. It is for us to do ours.
He thought of the money he’d given his mother. Rumpled soft filthy feel of bills. At least, that had happened.
He telephoned Faye and listened, trembling with anticipation, to the subtly mocking sound of the ringing, ringing in an empty room.
* * *
—
Jules had met Faye in downtown Detroit a few weeks before. In a blizzard of thinking he had stepped off a curb, almost been hit by a city bus, a woman cried, “Watch out!” Boldly this stranger tugged at Jules’s arm, pulling him back up onto the curb. The bus turned the corner, spewing exhaust in derision.
“That was pretty close, kid,” the woman said, laughing.
She shook her head as if admiring. Marveling. She was a kidder, you could see, but Jules was too shaken, confused, dizzy, to absorb the fact of her; the face was a poster-face, too beautiful to believe in. Jules hadn’t eaten for some time but hadn’t believed he was hungry, with so much to think about and nothing decided.
He couldn’t even remember what it was he hadn’t decided.
He would have ventured into the street again, but the woman spoke sharply and with authority. “Say, kid. Are you all right? Look at me.”
Jules looked, obediently. The woman was no one he knew or might possibly have known. She had metallic-blond hair, obviously bleached; she was older than Jules, and at once asserted her authority. He would learn that she frequently “met” individuals who “interested” her on the street; it was the “democratic way”—“like on TV.” He would learn that she had children “in the hands of good caring people” but that, missing her children, sometimes, briefly, she saw in strangers’ faces, as in Jules’s, something that touched her heart. (Though Faye was attached “more or less permanently” to a married man, an automotive executive, who lived in the rich suburb of Bloomfield Hills.) Jules would always recall how she’d laughed at him, his rubbery legs, his near-to-being-killed, the look in his face.
Never had Jules seen a woman, outside the movies or TV, with such sharp, striking features; her presence like a hot, glowing bulb you couldn’t look too closely at, for it would blind you, but you couldn’t look away from, either. The flat level appraising look of her eyes was manly, intimidating. She wore a smoky-dark fur coat, obviously expensive, and was bare-headed, her metallic hair severely cut to frame her amazing face, exposing her waxy ears, combed in delicate little points in front of her ears, as a child might draw an angel’s curls. “You can stop staring now. I’ll get a cab.”
Shy and alarmed, not knowing what was happening to him, Jules waited beside the blond woman in the fur coat, and within a few seconds a Checker cab pulled up to the curb, like in the movies, and Jules who’d never before ridden in a cab climbed inside, clumsy and panting; and the woman in the fur coat climbed in beside him as if this w
ere the most natural thing in the world. Her thigh, through the velvety fur, pressed companionably against his. “Three-six-oh-nine East Jefferson,” the woman recited, and immediately Jules for all his haziness felt a stab of excitement: he knew the worth of East Jefferson, at the edge of Grosse Pointe. It went with the fur coat and the blond’s cool imperial style.
They were taken to an apartment building that looked to Jules’s eye like a marble fortress with heraldic designs (Egyptian?) in its facade. Just across the street was the Belle Isle Bridge, and beyond it Belle Isle, where, summer nights, and weekend nights, you weren’t supposed to go, if you were white…What everybody called a “race riot” had taken place in the island park years ago, in the spring of 1943, people had died, whites and Negroes both, there was a guy up the street from Loretta whose eye had been gouged out by drunk niggers he said and sometime soon, there was going to be another “race riot” to put things right; but now Belle Isle looked peaceful like something floating in a dream, unnaturally still. Jules was standing flat-footed on the pavement staring as the woman paid the cabbie.
“D’you want to come up?” The woman nudged his arm. “Or maybe you’d prefer swimming in the river?”
Jules stammered, “Up to your place? Here?”
“Why’d you think you’re here?”
To this, Jules had no reply.
The woman laughed at him, nudging him again, gently. “You’re looking shaky. It would be cruel to dump you now.”
Faye’s voice was level, matter-of-fact. If this was an adventure for her, as for Jules, she would give no sign.
That first day, she brought Jules home with her to 3609 East Jefferson as you’d bring home a stray dog, and he found himself in a foyer, high-ceilinged, ornate, like in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and in an elevator with elaborate grillwork he saw his pale blurred image gleam up out of rich dark wood, the startled hopeful face and widened eyes.
Jules laughed, nervously. Touched his forehead in a gesture of goofy helplessness, expelled a shaky breath—and it was the right gesture, the woman laughed, smiling broadly; she liked him. He could feel her liking him. He needed that. “My God,” he said, playing at being overwhelmed even as he was overwhelmed, his senses flooded. Once inside the woman’s apartment, she removed her coat and tossed it onto a chair, and drew open drapes to her windows to let in the bright sky above Belle Isle, which hurt Jules’s eyes as if he’d never seen it before. Faye’s apartment was on the sixth, top floor of the dignified old stone building. She’d begun to talk, not to explain herself but simply to talk to Jules, as you might poke a dazed animal with a stick, not to hurt it, but to make friendly contact. “My name is Faye. If you’ve been wondering.” She came to Jules, crowding him, and shook his hand.