The Wicked City

Somehow I force my right arm into movement. I shift the cigarette into the other hand and lift her little fingers and kiss them. Tiny, perfect nails like chips from a pearl. “Hello, Patsy darling. I used to rock you to sleep when you were a tiny baby.”

  She smiles. Ducks her head into the safety of Johnnie’s shoulder. (Can’t fault her for that, can I?)

  Johnnie says, “Tell your big sister what you been doing today.”

  “Reading,” she whispers.

  “Reading what?”

  “Books.”

  “Big-girl books, ain’t that right?”

  “Isn’t,” I say. “We say isn’t instead of ain’t. Isn’t that right, Patsy?”

  Patsy giggles into Johnnie’s jacket.

  “She’s a swell reader,” Johnnie says. “Took to her letters right away. We got a teacher in here, just for her. No schoolhouse for Miss Patsy.”

  “What about your numbers, Patsy? Numbers are important, too.”

  “Does her numbers, too. Regular little Einstein, this sweet child.”

  “But mostly you like to read, don’t you, darling?” I touch her fingers again. I can’t help it. Her eyes are a bright, clear blue, the same shade as Mama’s. Same shade as mine.

  Patsy nods and moves her thumb against mine, and I’ll be damned if that slight little caress doesn’t start my eyes stinging.

  “Yes.” I mimic her nod. “I can tell. You know why?”

  Her eyebrows lift up. I lean in close.

  “Because I was just the same way.”

  9

  NOW I’M getting sloppy, aren’t I? I apologize. Too little sleep, maybe, or else the sight of my mama dying in her luxurious bed upstairs. Or the sight of Patsy’s pretty eyes, as I said, just exactly like those in Mama’s wedding photograph I mentioned earlier, except full of color instead of sepia, and all new and unspoiled.

  And she likes to read. Well, she doesn’t get that from her daddy, for certain. Duke can’t read. He’d kill me for telling you that, but it’s true. I remember how I used to hide inside the library—not this one, obviously, but the decrepit room tacked onto the dilapidated old shack we call a town hall—baking all afternoon in the chair next to the hot window, until you could stick four and twenty blackbirds into me and call me a pie. Miss Tweed was the librarian then. She was the preacher’s daughter and awfully young, maybe seventeen or eighteen. The nearest I had to a sister, though we never fixed to speak. We didn’t need to. One time, afternoon in the infernal center of July, so hot you might burn your palm just setting it against the window glass, Duke came looking for me, steaming from the ears. Miss Tweed saw him through the door and flicked her finger at me, and quick as a tick I ducked under her desk, next to her legs, and I listened to that young lady inform my step-daddy in her calm librarian’s voice that no, she hadn’t seen me today, must be too warm indoors. I was more likely cooling off in the creek with the other small fry. And such was Duke’s fear of book-learned women, of libraries in general, that he turned away right then. Didn’t even question her. And when the coast was clear I crawled out from her desk and we sort of looked at each other, and I saw that her cheeks were as pale as mine, even in that blazing room. She got married soon after, nice young fellow visiting the parsonage from Baltimore, and the library fell into neglect. When I tried to sneak inside the following summer, the door was closed and locked, and nobody seemed to have a key.

  10

  COMPOSURE RESTORED by cigarettes and rye whiskey, I’m ready to climb back up the colossal staircase and sit with Mama until dinner-time. Johnnie takes Patsy out to play in the snow, and I watch them through the window of Mama’s bedroom. There seems to be some kind of formal garden out there, replacing the henhouse and the corncrib and the rusting remains of farm machinery, though you can only just trace its neat, boxy edges beneath the snow and imagine how it looks in spring. Down where the trees stick up and the white ground bends south toward the creek, I keep my eyes away.

  The nurse fidgets a moment and leaves, without saying a word, and I draw the chair closer to the bed and sit down. Mama’s hands are quieter now, her eyelids more peaceful. A smell of medicine hangs over her, and the peculiar sour-sweet scent of death, and I swallow down a mite of bile and open a book on my lap. Little Women. Stolen from Duke’s new library downstairs, pages crisp and new, binding rigid with glue. Mama always loved that story. I guess she liked to think that in another time, maybe married to a different man, she might have been some kind of Marmee herself. All hoopskirts and wisdom and fortitude and faith.

  At the sound of my voice, however, her fingers start up the twitching again. Her eyelids churn, her lips spasm. I keep on reading in my most soothing voice, thinking maybe it’s just the change in the air, the additional stimulation, but her agitation grows and grows and at last I drop the book on the plush carpet next to the chair legs, and I lay my head on the counterpane next to her thin and struggling chest. I take her cadaverous hand and hold it against my cheek. I don’t know which of us I’m trying to quiet. The heat of her fever seeps past my skin. I can’t stand the bubbling in her lungs, the death smell of her, the frail, febrile state of her bones in my palm. I want her just to die already, and then my throat and my eyes fill with remorse, which is wet and tastes of salt.

  In the end, I expect I fall asleep, because when the door bangs open, startling me to my feet, the space behind the curtains has gone entirely dark.

  “By the good Lord God,” says Duke Kelly, “if it ain’t the prodigal daughter.”

  11

  AS FAR as I can remember, my step-daddy never held down a regular job. Maybe when he was younger; I don’t know. He used to say that was because there wasn’t no jobs going here in River Junction, but other men found some kind of work, everhow menial, or scratched out a bit of food from the earth for fear of starving otherwise. Or else fear of watching their wives and children starve, which most fellows consider even worse.

  Not Duke, however. Never packed a lunch pail so long as I knew him. Sit and brood, or else meet the other boys for checkers or rye whiskey at the saloon, smoking and flapping their gums all afternoon and sometimes all night. Every so often he would disappear for a day or two and come back with money—I don’t know how much—and that’s what we lived on, near as I can tell. But a regular job? Not enough for Duke. He was like a man waiting around for a train, a train that didn’t come but once a day. Except that you didn’t know the exact hour of its arrival, no timetable for a train like that, so there you sat, all day long, doing just enough to keep your heart still beating. Just passing time.

  Now it seems Duke was right about the train. He certainly wears that air into Mama’s bedroom: the air of a man who’s been proved right about the most important question in his life. Physically, he’s just the same. Hair as black and sleek, not a gray strand daring to touch daylight. Eyes as hard, chin as cleft, shoulders as boxy. Maybe a little rounder around the jowls, but prosperity will do that. The only thing changed is his clothes. He’s dressed in a dark, expensive suit, made from the same rarefied grade of cashmere wool as that worn by the partners back at Sterling Bates on the corner of Wall and Broad, and his starched white cuffs are linked in solid gold. From his collar sticks the same stout, tanned, country neck, like that of a prize bull, and his thick lips press into the kind of smile that makes me want to leap out the window into the new-fallen snow.

  I turn back to Mama. “Be quiet. She’s dying.”

  “I know that, sugar.”

  He walks up behind me and comes to rest just over my right shoulder. I keep my back straight and my eyes on Mama’s face. She’s turned her head a little, as if hearing Duke’s voice, and her fingers twitch against my hand.

  “Poor thing,” he says. “Never did have much strength.”

  “Because you kept filling her up with babies. Sucking her life away.”

  “Now, just what was I supposed to do, honey? We was man and wife. I never did run around after other women, did I? I kept to your mama just like I vowed.?
??

  “That’s not how I remember it.”

  He laughs. “Now, that’s different. Ain’t you her own flesh and blood?”

  “You disgust me.”

  “Fine words.” He reaches past me and presses the backs of his fingers against her temple. Her eyes open. She turns her head into his touch. “Where’s the nurse gone? Nurse ain’t supposed to leave her for a single minute.”

  “I’m here. I’m nursing her.”

  “Well, now, Geneva Rose.” He lifts his hand away and brings it to rest on my shoulder, just under the lobe of my ear, pinky finger pressing intimately against the bare skin of my neck. “That ain’t your job, is it?”

  I knock his hand away and bolt from the chair. “You stay away from me. You stay away from the both of us.”

  “She’s my wife. I ain’t a-going nowhere.”

  “If you touch her again, I’ll kill you.”

  He curls his hand around the back of the chair I’ve just left. “You got no call to speak those words to me, Geneva Rose. I gave you my name and my home. Your mama’s had the best money can buy. Just look at her. You want her dying in some damn cot in a boardinghouse, all covered over with fleas?”

  “Better than being bitten by a flea like you.”

  Duke doesn’t move. Stands there next to Mama’s bed, breathing and staring inside his fine suit of cashmere wool. The radiators hiss at the windows. Around the topmost slat of that chair, his fingers flex and curl, flex and curl. “Look at you, baby. So fine and pretty, your hair all soft. Lips all red. Dress all short. Tell your daddy the truth, now. How many men you had since you moved to the city?”

  “Dozens. Took me dozens to scrape off the stain of your hands on my skin, Duke Kelly, and I ain’t finished yet. I’m here to say good-bye to my mama, and then I’m going back to New York, where I am aiming to take up with the first man I see.”

  He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulls out a fine gold cigarette case, much like the one Johnnie showed me earlier. Takes his time lighting a cigarette with one of those new butane contraptions, also plated in gold. “No, you ain’t either. You is going back to that nice young fella you been stepping out with, ain’t that right? That swell college boy you keep tucked up in your bed. That cheap little room-a yours. That cheap little room on—now, what was it? Christopher Street.”

  No way to describe the sensation that strikes through me at those words. Like an icy bucket over the head, I guess, so cold it freezes your nerves in an instant, numbs the very reflexes that are supposed to save you.

  I sort of squeak, “What do you know about that?”

  “Aw, sugar. I know everything about you. You think I’d let my baby girl go off to New York City without a-keeping a tender watch over her? I been watching you all along, Geneva Rose. Keeping my eye on you.” He winks. Shoots his cuff. Takes a long drag on his cigarette and turns his head to gaze down at his wife. “Just like I watch over your mama. What’s money for, if you can’t take good care-a your women and children?”

  “You haven’t taken good care of her. You’ve killed her.”

  “Now, that ain’t fair. The good Lord God be taking her back to His bosom, that’s all. Plenty-a women had more babies than her. Having babies is natural. What she was put on this good earth to do. Now He be a-calling her back.” He bends over Mama’s body and strokes her forehead. “I’m just here to see as she gets the best-a everything before she goes. Best money can buy.”

  “Blood money, you mean. Every dollar of it made outside the law.”

  “What do you care? You been drinking your share. Don’t you fix to tell me you ain’t. Don’t fix to tell me you think a fella shouldn’t enjoy himself a damn glass-a whiskey at the end of a hard day, just on account-a the government says he can’t. You just mad on account-a it’s me getting rich, instead-a some other racket? Look what I done for this town.” He spreads out his arm. “Every man employed. Every woman got a chicken in her pot, shoes on her feet. You want to take all that away?”

  “No.”

  “Good, then. Because I ain’t going nowhere, Geneva Rose. You remember that.”

  He holds my mama’s hand as he gazes at me, and the look on his smooth face curdles the atmosphere. The fire hisses in the fireplace, piling more heat atop the infernal output of the brand-new radiators, and the sweat trickles right down my spine to dampen the back of my girdle. Make my stockings prickle on my legs. Make my dress feel like a hair shirt, like I want to jump right on out of it. Jump on out of myself entirely.

  “You can do as you like, I reckon. Just stay away from me.”

  He makes a smile. “You sure about that? You been living in a rat hole there in New York. A rat hole. You might could live in a castle, if you like.”

  Mama makes a little coughing sound. Legs go thrashing. I bound to the bed. Elbow my stepfather aside. Lift up her head a little, reach for the glass of water on the bedside table. The coughing stills. She turns her face toward my inner arm, like she’s catching my scent, and I wet her lips with the water so she can lick it off. I don’t imagine she can properly swallow. The bed’s hung in heavy red damask, window curtains too, the color of slow insanity.

  Duke says softly, “Don’t need to be this way, sugar. You know I can be a right good friend.”

  “You must be tetched. I already told you. You touch me again, and I’ll kill you.”

  He laughs. “Baby girl. I don’t mean that kind-a friends. Not no more. You is soiled goods, Geneva Rose, you been soiled good in that city-a yours, no mistake, and you can say what you like, but I don’t never follow where other men-a gone.”

  “Except with Mama.”

  “Well, that there was different. And your mama and I, we had an understanding betwixt us, see.”

  I stare down at Mama’s tormented chest, beneath that satin counterpane, sawing up and down in a syncopated jazz rhythm. I hate the proximity of Duke’s body, the muscular tension of his shoulders. The smell of his breath, laden with rye whiskey and good Virginia tobacco. My loathing is so vigorous, so native, that the act of standing next to him requires an extreme exercise of will, the same way you have to force the north pole of one magnet into the north pole of another.

  “Some understanding,” I mutter.

  “You always was so contrary.” Breath hot on the top of my head. “You never did comprehend what was good for you.”

  “What was good for you, you mean.”

  “What’s that, baby girl? Can’t hear you.”

  “Go to hell.”

  And that’s when his hand encircles my throat from behind, without any kind of sound or ceremony: just those sharp-nailed fingers digging knowledgeably in between the tendons, pressing against the ridges and bumps of my voice box. The cigarette burns a hair’s breadth from my skin. He says gently, into my ear, “Don’t you go doing nothing stupid, baby girl. You know I don’t take kindly to that. There’s one thing I can’t stand on this earth, and that’s a damn Judas. You understand me?”

  I can’t exactly speak, so I just nod up and down against the washboard of his chest, while my stomach boils and my ears roar.

  “Good,” says Duke.

  The door bangs open behind us, and he releases me like a spring. I pitch forward into the bed, just saving myself from landing atop poor Mama’s belly, while the nurse, reeking of rye whiskey, makes some anxious, disjointed apology about visiting the lavatory.

  12

  SOMETIME IN the night, Mama wakes up lucid. I am dozing beside her in the bed, and I bolt straight up.

  “Mama?”

  “Geneva Rose. That you?”

  “It surely is, Mama.”

  “Thought I done heard you there, somewheres.”

  “You surely did. Right here next to you on the bed, Mama.”

  “That’s right good-a you, sugar. So pleased you came.”

  “Course I came. You’re my mama, aren’t you?”

  She doesn’t answer. She’s been whispering, like the sound of paper mov
ing against paper, and I can’t see her real well in the dark like this. Only the coals for light. I reach out and find her hand, and for some reason I am overcome by the memory of those hands braiding my hair when I was small, before she sent me away to the convent. I used to stare at her lively fingers in the scrap of mirror above the washstand, darting in and out of my uncooperative copper mane, whipping those strands into nice neat overlapping order on either side of my head. Mouth full of pins. She used to tell me how she did the other girls’ hair back in New York, she was real good at it.

  “You was reading Little Women, wasn’t you?”

  “Your favorite. Remember how we used to read together, Mama? You had all the voices just right.”

  “You was always such a good reader, Geneva Rose. You read still?”

  “When I can.”

  “You all right in New York? You ain’t got yourself into no trouble, have you?”

  “Never once. I take good care of myself.”

  “Knowed you would. That’s why—”

  (Voice lapses away.)

  “Why what, Mama? Why you let me leave for the city?”

  “Yes. Had to, didn’t I?”

  I run my fingertips along the bones of her hand. “I reckon so.”

  My pulse is striking wildly. My lips are dry. I do recall reading that the dying sometimes discover a moment of final clarity, just before the reaper bends down and snatches them away. Feel as if my eyes are scraping the shadows, looking for a sickle gleaming in the moonshine. Feel as if the seconds are ticking away. No way to ask what needs asking. No way to say what needs saying. And she’s gone quiet. Maybe it’s over already. I press her knuckles.

  “So sorry,” she whispers.

  (Relief.)

  “You got nothing to be sorry for. Did all you could. You’re a good mama.”

  She says something I can’t quite make out. Something that sounds like negation.

  “Why, yes, you did, Mama. You found a way to send me away to the convent. To college—”