Just Above My Head Page 34

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Why, no, I’m not,” she said, and looked directly at me, a beautiful, searching, open look. “I just don’t see any reason to go up yonder with them people who done already drove me half crazy down here. And who have drove themselves completely crazy.” She picked up her tray, and started to move. Someone had called her: her name, I gathered, was Thomasina. “So I ain’t too much interested in this kingdom down here, neither—I’m coming!” she shouted. “But my grandmama, down in Waycross, she told me, we got a kingdom. We just got to move on in it—see you in a minute, folks,” she said, and went to serve another table.

  “Well, she don’t hardly want to be desegregated,” Peanut said. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I see,” said Sidney, abruptly looming over the table and then sitting down at it, “that you trying to get next to my waitress. But I can tell you right now that she ain’t hardly thinking about none of y’all.”

  “Hands off,” said Peanut. “Am I right?”

  Sidney grinned, looking quickly at me and then back to Peanut. “Oh, no,” he said. “She don’t belong to me. I just happen to know that she is occupied. Anyway,” he added, looking at Arthur with pity and then grinning at Peanut, “she say she don’t want no more children. You got that, junior?”

  Arthur watched him with a small, stubborn smile. “You wait, Sidney. I’m going to surprise the hell out of your ass.”

  “You sure give Arthur a hard time,” Peanut said.

  “Ain’t been doing a thing in the world,” said Sidney, “but trying to keep his dumb ass out of trouble while his big brother was away.” And he suddenly laughed and grabbed Arthur and kissed him on the forehead. “Now ain’t that true? Go on, now, tell the truth and shame the devil.”

  Arthur grinned, but most unwillingly, weakly resisting Sidney’s grasp. “My brother don’t never talk to me like that.”

  “Ah,” said Sidney. “That’s what’s wrong with you. He been polite. But I will call you a motherfucker and kick your ass.” He let Arthur go, and turned to me. “That’s just because I love you both.”

  I said, “I guess a lot’s been happening since I’ve been gone.”

  “Yes,” said Sidney, “and then again, no. Depends.”

  “Depends?”

  “Well, yes. It depends partly on what you want to happen, partly on what you afraid might happen—and mostly on what you don’t see coming.”

  I watched him with a smile and took the box with his ring in it out of my pocket and put it on the table. “This is for you, man. I hope you like it.”

  Arthur and Peanut watched, smiling, as Sidney took the box and held it for a moment between his two big hands.

  “If I don’t like it—can I trade it in?”

  “Go on, man,” said Arthur, “and open the box.”

  Sidney smiled at me, unreadably, as he undid the package and opened the box. He took out the ring and held it for a moment in the center of his palm—“That’s beautiful!” Arthur said—and then slipped it, finally, on his fourth finger, the scarlet eye gathering force from his dark skin.

  He stretched out his arm to admire his hand and looked at me again. “It is beautiful,” he said. “Thank you, brother.” Something seemed to thunder in the air between us for a second, something both troubling and peaceful, and we both smiled. “I’ll send Thomasina over with drinks for you people,” he said. “I don’t drink no more while I’m working.”

  I had the feeling, from something intense in his eyes, that he wanted to say more, but he stopped and stood up. “I’m going back to work. Listen. You and Martha going to stay here with small fry, or you going to find someplace quiet?”

  “I guess,” I said, “that we’ll find someplace quiet.”

  “Well. We’ll figure it out when she gets here,” and he stroked my cheek with his ring hand and went back to the bar.

  Arthur was watching me without watching me, and his brow was faintly comic with his effort to conceal worry. I wanted to reassure him, but I couldn’t—that would have been jumping the gun. I wondered what he was thinking, what he had seen, what he knew; realized, again, that no one had mentioned Martha to me, and no one had mentioned Sidney. They couldn’t: and if they couldn’t, they knew that I would soon see why. I felt, now, that I might be in for a fairly rough five minutes. I knew that I didn’t know how I was going to handle it, but I didn’t feel that it would be worse than that, or more than that. Then something seemed to charge the air at my back and something happened in Arthur’s eyes, and I knew that Martha had arrived.

  Without turning my head, I could see her, as on that Christmas night we had first come here, leaning up on the bar, on tiptoe, to kiss Sidney on the nose. It seemed to me that I could hear their laughter, the same but not the same, and see their faces: Martha’s bright from the chilly wind and Sidney’s, a little dulled with fatigue and yet, beautifully heavy with hope. Then it was real to me that time had passed and that, yes, something had been lost.

  Or: perhaps I had lost something, but something had also been gained. For now, Arthur looked at me with a look he could never have had before—a look warning, apprehensive, amused, and resigned—and said, “Martha’s here, brother.” It was as though he simply did not want me to be caught unawares: the rest was up to me. And, with that look, he told me not merely what he knew about my immediate situation but also what he had begun to discover about many things in the time I had been gone.

  And so, I turned in my seat, making myself ready, not yet daring to stand—not certain that I had the right to stand, to make that big a deal out of her arrival: when I had had that right, I hadn’t used it—and turned my face to the bar, smiling, as she turned from the bar and started toward us. She was smiling, the happiest smile I had ever seen on her, she was wearing a navy blue dress and a tan raincoat, her skin was glowing and her hair a little tousled from the wind. She was a little older, she was exceedingly handsome, and I was very glad to see her. I stood up, and she put her arms around me and I took her in my arms. It was not the same, but it was all right, it was better than all right.

  “My God,” she said, “you’re here at last! We missed you, and we talked about you, I even took up prayer!” She pulled back, with her hands on my shoulders, to look at me. “Well, you sure missed your mother’s homecooking, child—and mine, and Aunt Josephine’s—but, otherwise—!”

  “No visible scars,” I said.

  “Ah, but the invisible ones!—we’ll get to that, later.” She turned to Arthur and Peanut, who were standing. “I’m not sure,” she said to Arthur, “that I’m still talking to you, but I’ll give you a hug, just for old times’ sake. Just because I know it wouldn’t be right to beat you up in front of your brother his first day home.” She and Arthur laughed, and hugged each other. Arthur said, “I don’t know if you’ve met my friend, Peanut, we used to sing together—”

  “Oh”—with a quick look at me—”but I’ve heard of Peanut, believe me.” They shook hands. “Sit down, please.”

  I helped her off with her coat, and sat her down and we simply looked at each other for a moment. Peanut took her coat from me and hung it up. Thomasina appeared with her tray, and began putting our drinks on the table. Sidney had sent me a double Scotch, and Martha’s daiquiri, I noticed, had turned out into an old-fashioned. Arthur had been demoted to ginger ale, and Peanut was drinking beer.

  “We going to drink up quick,” said Arthur, “and leave you two alone. Or we can go to the bar right now.”

  Martha gave him a look. “Arthur, you just want to hit the streets, don’t you be jiving me. You was never worried about leaving us alone before.” She raised her glass, first to Peanut, then to Arthur, then to me: “To the one who has come home.”

  Her face, then, became a face I did not yet know but was to come to know—to meet—in the years stretching before us. It was the face of a woman who had come to a decision, resolutely putting her girlhood behind her, insofar, at least, as she could then
know. It was the first time I saw the face of the black girl-woman we would meet all up and down those dusty chain-gang highways, in years to come, for years to come. The face was as intransigent as it was vulnerable, the very definition of nobility—take all you have, and give to the poor, but don’t bring any of that shit near me.

  I once was lost, but now I’m found.

  I raised my glass: ‘To being home again, with those I love.”

  We drank, and Martha and I stared at each other—for what I thought was a very brief moment but it was long enough for both Arthur and Peanut to drain their glasses, and stand up. And they left Martha and I there, alone.

  “So,” I said. “Where shall we begin?”

  “Well,” Martha said, after a moment, “first of all, let’s forget all about Alice in Wonderland—the end is not in sight and the beginning is a long time ago.”

  We laughed together, but I did not want to prolong her gallant agony. I watched her face. She was older, yes, but it wasn’t really time which had happened in her face—there had not, after all, been that much time—what had happened spoke of lonely, melancholy decision. The price was written in the jawbone and the cheekbone, in the not-quite-false directness and tranquillity of the eye. Not quite false because too hard won: the struggle was more vivid than the victory.

  Yet the struggle was itself a kind of victory and only that involuntary depth of love which I knew I did not feel for her could dare attempt distinguish the will from the deed.

  I offered her a cigarette, but she waved her hand and smiled no, and we sipped our drinks for a moment.

  Everything around us was very quiet suddenly, as though invisible multitudes awaited the outcome of our contest in this arena.

  “That letter you didn’t write me—was about you and Sidney?”

  “Yes. Not exactly. It was about much more than that—but, yes, I wanted to tell you about—me and Sidney.”

  Martha’s eyes, at that moment, were so beautiful and so bright with pain that I could scarcely believe my eyes. I had never seen such nakedness before in the eyes of anyone I loved, or in anyone’s eyes. It made me very happy that anyone could look like that, could love like that, and, at the same time, it frightened me, too.

  “Well, Martha—why couldn’t you write me? About you and Sidney, I mean? I don’t have any claim on you. We agreed about that when I left here.”

  “Yes. You said it, and I agreed. Only—you didn’t really say it, not in so many words, and so I couldn’t really agree.”

  I watched her, and I thought about that.

  “After all—I had to think that—one of the reasons you didn’t want us to have any claims on each other—was that you thought you might not be coming back. Or that you would be coming back with one leg or no eyes—who knows what you were thinking? But that’s what I was thinking. And I didn’t even know that I was thinking that—until—” and she stopped.

  “I think we should get out of here,” I said. “I’ll bring you back, or we can tell Sidney where to meet us.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, and so we rose and started making our way out of there. We hadn’t quite decided where we were going, but we told Sidney that we’d call him.

  We went to a very quiet kind of cocktail lounge near 125th Street on Seventh, and sat in a booth way in the back, alone, far from the others. The others were couples a little above our age and station.

  The waitress came, and we ordered our drinks. We sat in a charged and friendly silence, listening to Ella Fitzgerald on the jukebox.

  “Are you two planning to get married?” I asked.

  “I guess so. I hope so.” She grinned. “We’re much more old-fashioned than you.”

  I grunted. “You want to bet? I’m just a late starter, that’s all.”

  “Anyway. After you left, I hardly saw Sidney at all. Maybe just instinctively, we avoided each other. I never went into Jordan’s Cat, and we never even ran into each other in the street, even though we live in the same neighborhood.”

  I wanted to tease her a little: “What do you mean—you ‘instinctively’ avoided each other?”

  “Oh, come on, you know damn well what I mean.” We both laughed. The waitress came, with our drinks, and peanuts and potato chips. The voice of Ella Fitzgerald gave way to the voice of Pearl Bailey.

  “It wasn’t all that funny, then,” she said carefully. “I didn’t know where you’d left me—but—you’d left me not liking myself very much.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing for me to say.

  “I didn’t want to blame you—and I didn’t want to start blaming men—so I worked hard, and spent most nights home.” She laughed. “Aunt Josephine was most upset.”

  I felt an odd, lonely spasm of regret at her refusal to place the blame, at the same time that I was compelled to respect her. But I also felt, irrationally, that this refusal to place the blame could be seen as a way of demolishing my manhood. Certainly a man looks sharply at a woman who refuses to place the blame on him!

  “I didn’t really see Sidney until after Julia’s father beat her up so bad, and she lost the baby”—she picked up her drink and looked down into it, then looked up at me—“they told you about all that?”

  “Oh, yeah. They told me about it.”

  “When that first day was over—because that shit went on for days, we didn’t know whether Julia was going to live or die, and her father was a revelation, baby, I never saw anything like it—but I’ll tell you about that another day—your mama and I just walked down the road to Jordan’s Cat and sat down. Neither of us said a word, nobody said, Let’s have a drink. We just walked to the nearest bar and sat down.

  “And you know I wasn’t hardly thinking about Sidney. I was thinking about that girl, and her father. And I was sick. Your mama and I were both sick. And we knew already wasn’t nothing going to happen to him. They couldn’t hold him, they was going to have to let him go.”

  I watched something enter Martha’s face, and it caused a silence in me. My mother, her mother, Julia—at least three women entered Martha’s face, all of them appalled by Julia’s bloody passage into womanhood. Their eyes were all fixed on something which, perhaps, no man could see. Joel was indeed, for example, as Martha said, a revelation—I would never have used that word: I did not know which, for her, of the seven seals had been broken. Joel appalled the man in me, he made me sick with shame; but I had placed, with speed, so vast a distance between his manhood and my own that he could not threaten me, he had no power over me; and this could not be true for any woman. I could divorce myself from Joel. They could not divorce themselves from Julia. More precisely, perhaps, it wasn’t hard for me to protect myself against the possible Joel in me, to blot his presence out completely. But it was not so easy, as I now saw, for Martha to obliterate from her days or from her nights the cord that connected her to the brutally broken virgin.

  So we sat in silence for a while. It was getting late, past one A.M. From far away, we heard the voice of Frank Sinatra. I signaled the waitress for another round. She came, with this silence ringing still, and took away our empty glasses, and Martha finally lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t think Mama Montana and I said more than two words to each other. We just ordered our drinks, and sat there, like zombies. Then Sidney came in, and”—Martha laughed—”it was as though he woke us up. We realized, for the first time, where we were, and we looked at each other as if to say, How did we get here? Like in the fairy tales, you know? when the Prince comes along and he waves his magic wand, and oo-bop-she-bam! you’re changed!”

  And she laughed again, and the waitress came back and set our drinks before us, along with new potato chips, and smiled tolerantly at us, as though she took us for newlyweds, or lovers.

  “Sidney was very nice during that whole time, and your mama liked him a lot. And that meant something, I must say”—she leaned forward, gesturing with her newly lit cigarette—”because I trust your mama.”

  I said, I
couldn’t help it, “Sure. She treated Sidney like a son.” Then I said, “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “You should be,” she said, refusing to be checked. “After all, you treat him like a brother.” She paused, narrowing her eyes, both shrewd and mocking. “Don’t you?”

  She was calling up my promissory notes. “Yes,” I said, “I do.”

  She was silent for a moment, searching my eyes for something. Then, “We started going out here and there—a movie, a concert, sometimes I’d come and have a drink with him at the end of the bar. Somehow, sitting at the end of that bar at night made me very happy because I knew that he was happy to see me there, just sitting there, even though he was always busy and we couldn’t talk much.”

  “It was sitting at the end of the bar,” I said, “that did it.” And I was not being mocking. I could see it.

  “Yes,” she said. She looked down. “He needed me. I made him happy. I made a difference in his life.” She looked up, into my eyes. “And that made a difference in my life. And—we hadn’t yet touched each other, Hall.”

  She looked around the bar, looking, again, at something I couldn’t see.

  “And he gave me the courage to begin to think—about you, about you and me. I saw that I had been dreaming. It wasn’t because of Korea that you didn’t want to marry me—”

  “I never said that, Martha. Be fair.”

  She smiled. “Be fair!” Then, “No. But that was in the background, that was always—unspoken. Anyway,” she said. “Remember that I’m not blaming you. For anything.”

  It was true. It was not true. I watched her eyes. I held my peace.

  She looked at her watch, and sipped her drink.

  “I began to see, anyway, that you would never want to marry me, there would always be something in the way. Well. I began to see that I’d been dreaming—dreaming that when you came home, with all the battles over, and the danger behind, you would feel that you had the right to ask me to marry you.” She threw back her head, and laughed. “It was a nice dream, though. It kept me going through some rough days, I can tell you. But—”