Just Above My Head Page 38

  Yet, “Why not?” I asked.

  “He was too young. I didn’t want him to know about his father. I didn’t want him to know”—she smiled—“anything about me.”

  “But Julia—how could you keep him from knowing?”

  “If I had managed to get down there like I wanted to,” she said stubbornly, “with some money, and able to do something for him—and I was prepared to turn tricks for that, now, that’s no lie—well, he wouldn’t have had to know it, it wouldn’t have had to cross his mind, we could have just moved on from there—leaving Mama and Daddy, yes, and holy Little Sister Julia, too, far behind us.” She sipped her drink with a sad smile. “But it wasn’t meant to be like that. I got there helpless, and I was helpless for a while.”

  The waiter came to take our orders. Julia looked up at him, quickly, changing completely in a split second, and, in that split second, I realized that Julia was perfectly aware of her public effect. But her awareness was artless and direct, a little wry, perhaps, but good-natured—the tomboy and the lady exchanging a private wink.

  She fussed over the menu for a while, allowing her eyes—far less made up than in the ad—to have their effect, and, finally, settled for chicken cacciatore—”ain’t nothing but fricasseed chicken”—and I said I’d have the same, and two more drinks.

  “You’re going to get me drunk,” Julia said.

  “That’s all right. I’ll take you home. And we’ll see how well you manage the stairs.”

  She laughed. “That place is not the best place for coming home drunk.”

  “Or for leaving drunk. I’d think twice about coming to any of your parties.”

  “We might be having a party soon. Jimmy’s got something coming up, and looks like I’ll be working—at least, I’ve got appointments all this week.”

  The waiter came with our drinks, and Julia held out her empty glass, smiling like a little girl. The waiter placed our drinks before us, with a hand not altogether steady, and, in a kind of speechless paroxysm of confusion and delight, smiled back.

  I smiled, and lifted my glass. “To you. Something tells me you likely to be working steady.”

  “Lord, wouldn’t that be nice? I damn sure hope so.”

  She put her drink down. We were silent. In the silence, something gathered—Julia asked, looking at me, “Have you seen my father? does anybody have any news of him?”

  “You don’t? he hasn’t written, or anything?”

  She shook her head, her great eyes looking into mine as though she were depending on her eyes to communicate something she could never say.

  Then, “No. Not in all these years. It’s like he’s just vanished from the earth.”

  I said finally, “Well, none of us have seen him—not my mama, not my daddy—nobody’s seen him around. We figure—he must have left the city.”

  This city, or this life: we, really, didn’t care.

  Her eyes looked into mine for yet another moment, then she dropped her eyes, and picked up her drink.

  “It may sound funny,” she said, “and nobody knows everything that happened—except me—but I don’t have anything against him. Nothing at all.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “I don’t think so. I’d just like to know—that he’s all right. Somewhere.”

  I said, “Julia. You’re right. I don’t know everything that happened. But—from what I know—it seems to me that he might just be—afraid.”

  She threw back her head. “I know he’s afraid—he’s always been afraid, that’s what’s wrong with him.” She tapped a cigarette and put it between her lips. I lit it for her. “I hate to think of him dying. Alone, afraid, somewhere.” She inhaled, exhaled, blew smoke above my head. She said with a low, muffled passion, “He’s not the only guilty party!”

  I sipped my drink, and looked at her. I forced myself to pull back, so to speak, and then to look at her and then to say something that I felt had to be said: “Look. Neither are you. And you were a child.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry, but that’s true.”

  “Children,” she said, and looked away from me. “Children know a lot.”

  “They better. But they’re still children.”

  I reached across the table and took one still hand in mine.

  “Listen. Children know a lot—okay. But children don’t know what they know. They just: testing—testing—testing—they waiting to find out if anybody’s out there.” I sensed her resistance: it was in her patiently still, not quite inert hand. “Get one thing straight, baby—a child does not know, when he sets a match to the curtains and thinks fire is pretty, and fun, that he’s burning down the house, and him with it. You put out the fire and you pick up that child and you whip his ass until he thinks he is burning alive. Then he won’t think fire is so pretty and he won’t do it no more and he might live.”

  I relaxed my grasp of her hand, and stroked it.

  “Maybe I didn’t like you so much when you were a child, but I didn’t think it was really your fault—I told you that—but your father, Julia, ain’t no child. He is the guilty party. That’s why you ain’t heard from him. You can’t take on his responsibility. How you going to take on a responsibility when there wasn’t no possible way for you to have understood it, or even to know what a responsibility was? And you going to try to assume all that now?”

  I let go her hand, and pulled back—the dazzled waiter was approaching with our meal. He set it down in silence. Julia did not look up—said “thank you” from very far away. She picked up her napkin, I picked up mine.

  “I understand you. I just don’t want to play the innocent, wronged victim—”

  “Well. You are the innocent, wronged victim. That’s the truth. Now. Take it from there.” I watched her. “You got the balls?”

  She had begun nibbling at her chicken—now, she laughed.

  “Hall—”

  “Don’t Hall me. I knew you as a child.”

  Something in my tone checked her, made her look directly into my eyes.

  “I would have whipped your ass so bad, baby, that you would have had trouble getting to the potty, let alone trying to preach. Your behind would have been a sermon you listened to for days.” I signaled the waiter. “This is our first date, baby. You want some wine with your dinner?”

  She dropped her eyes demurely. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Keep it up. I might whip your behind before we get out of here—red or white?”

  The waiter, more securely intrigued than ever, and more at ease, stood over us.

  “Ah! Red,” said Julia, and she laughed. “For all kinds of reasons!”

  I laughed, helplessly, and ordered the wine and we ate in silence for a little while. It may have occurred to me, in that silence, that I was having a ball with my newfound friend. For she was absolutely new to me, although I knew her. Well, I didn’t know her. I was fascinated by her. I wanted to know her.

  “So how did you and Jimmy finally work it out?” I asked. “You seem to get along beautifully now.”

  “Well,” she said, with her stunning candor, “I was helpless. I couldn’t hide it.” She gestured with her fork, aimlessly, then put her fork on her plate and looked at me. “I couldn’t play big sister. I couldn’t play any of the roles I’d”—and she grimaced, like a child, like a woman—“played. I told you, I didn’t want Jimmy to know anything about me.” She picked up her fork again, looked down into her plate. “But he knew—that’s part of what I mean when I say, a child knows—I don’t disagree with what you just said, but I realized that Jimmy knew a whole lot more than I, or anybody else, told him—I, after all, hadn’t told!”

  Her eyes, when she said this, by some mighty effort of the will, were dry—drier, perhaps, than my own. Our wine came, and our waiter poured it, and Julia picked up her glass.

  I watched her, feeling myself being drawn closer to her with every breath I drew.

  “I didn’t want Jimmy to know anything about me. But I began
to see that I was wrong as two left shoes—and, I swear, Hall, that’s when I began to get well, I began to stop trying to sleep, I started fighting with my dreams—you know the only question Jimmy ever really asked me?”

  She sipped the red wine, and held the glass in both hands for a moment, her elbows on the table.

  “He came into the back room where I was, in the bed, and he sat down on the bed and we talked about this and that for a little while—school, his music, white people, black people, shit like that—I was watching his face, and I was a little amused because he’s so young and violent—and I was happy because he was talking to me and I had thought he never would—you know what I’m trying to say?”

  “Speak on, sister,” I said, and I sipped my wine. “I do believe I hear you.”

  “All of a sudden he asked, ‘Did he ever beat you? He ever put his hands on you?’ ”

  She put her wineglass down.

  “I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was I couldn’t lie. All I could say was yes.”

  She looked at her dinner and picked up her fork and touched it.

  “I watched his face. He just looked at me, for what seemed like a long time. Then, he laughed. He said, ‘Well, that’s two of us, ain’t it?’ He said, ‘Hey, tell you something. I dig having you for a sister. You dig having me for a brother?’ And he made a long face, like he knew I’d say no. And I started to laugh and to cry, and I hugged him —hugged him for the first time in my life. He was laughing and crying, too. He said, ‘Well, you better get up out that bed pretty soon, I need you out here.’ And I started to get well. I had to get well. Maybe I thought I didn’t want Jimmy to know nothing about me—and that really is bullshit—but Jimmy made me to know, somewhere, that you can’t really hide anything, and anyway, he damn sure needed somebody who knew something about him.”

  She smiled, and made her fork useful for a moment, and got some chicken past her tips.

  I watched her—is this an odd thing to say?—very proud of her.

  “And—do you know something about him? I’m sorry. I don’t know why I ask that. I guess I’m not asking you.”

  She said mockingly, “I do believe I hear you, brother. I don’t know enough to change him, or to save him. But I know enough to be there. I must be there.”

  “But suppose you get married—you probably will get married, one day, you know—and move to Timbuktu?”

  “I am married, you fool,” she said. “And don’t talk to me about Timbuktu! What difference does that make?”

  I laughed out loud. “Child, I don’t believe you ever left the pulpit.”

  She laughed with me. “Well, you know what they say, Hall —”

  I loved the way she said my name.

  “No. What do they say?”

  She raised her wineglass. “You can take the child out of the pulpit—”

  I raised mine. We were not quite laughing—smiling, looking at each other, confronting something neither of us could name.

  “But,” I said, “okay,”—and we touched glasses—I wanted her to say it—“how does the rest of it go?”

  We laughed together, the red wine shaking between us.

  “Hall, you getting old, your memory’s faltering. Soon, you going to have to start worrying about your teeth.”

  “Come on, you old married lady from Timbuktu—”

  We started laughing again.

  “Come on, what’s the rest of it?”

  “And you old enough to have taught it to me.”

  “Watch it. I don’t play that—how does it go?”

  “Well, you can’t take the pulpit out of this child, anyhow, there, you satisfied?” and we laughed so hard we spilled a little wine onto the table, and into our chicken.

  We went from there to a bar near Sheridan Square. It came to me that I was walking Julia around into and out of places which I had frequented when she was in the pulpit, when she was a child: I could not imagine what she was seeing. But you never can imagine that, when you are trying to see what you saw, through someone else’s eyes. Neither can the person for whom it is all new—who has not, that is, paid for this scene—see what you dimly think you saw. What you saw is in the price you paid, deeper than memory.

  Somewhere between Sheridan Square and East 18th Street, Julia and I fell in love.

  We walked because, at that time, not many taxi drivers stopped for niggers in New York. At night, you put up your hand and the cab veered toward you; then the driver saw you and veered away, like Lot hightailing it out of Sodom. After the third time this happened I was compelled to see that Julia was becoming more and more upset; not about the taxi drivers, but about me. She came into the center of the street where I stood cursing the taillights of a fleeing cab and took my hand and said that we should walk.

  She was right. Still, what galled me was that I was not entirely wrong. But—Julia comes from a long line of women who had to sing, He had a long chain on. Another man done gone. I put my pride in my pocket, and kept my balls, so to speak, where I could see and touch them, and we started to walk.

  It was late, not late—around midnight. It is not a very great distance from Sheridan Square to East 18th Street if two people are walking and talking together. And Julia and I could walk and talk together because we had been through—differently, far from each other—the same things. Neither of us had ever thought of our lives that way—as having been, somehow, always, inexorably connected. We did not really think of it now, either, on our walk, as we walked and talked together: and to say that we now discovered this makes what I am speaking of far too remote. As we walked, our climates became, imperceptibly, the same climate. This was both warm and terrifying. After all, Julia had been a little girl for me, an exceedingly irritating little girl preacher. I remember both her parents, vanished now in such different ways, and the way she had then treated her little brother. Now here she was, walking and talking beside me, and I knew too much about her to know anything about her at all. I knew only how she made me feel, how she caused a shaking deep within me, caused me for the first time in a long time to dare to wonder about happiness, about joy, to dare, almost, to hope. I didn’t want to hope. I didn’t know how to stop.

  We were walking hand in hand, swinging our hands together gently, like two children—two children we, each, in our different ways, remembered. We turned eastward on 18th Street, on the long, long blocks, dark now, which led to her apartment. We had stopped talking.

  Then she said, as we crossed Fourth Avenue, and entered the block which held her building, “Everytime I cross here, I think of Crunch, and that room he had on Fourteenth Street. Once we took a walk around here—just before he left. Then, sometimes, I used to walk around here by myself.”

  Something very swift and subtle, not trembling, not shrinking, occurred in her as she said this, a shifting of the beat: I felt it through her hand and heard it in her voice.

  I asked, “When was the last time you saw Crunch?”

  “He came to see me in New Orleans. But he didn’t really know what had happened. And I couldn’t tell him.” Then, “Oh, he knew—some things. But he didn’t know what happened to me—when I lost the baby. I didn’t want him to go through life thinking it was his baby. That my father had kicked his baby out of me. It didn’t seem fair. Crunch didn’t have nothing to do with it. And,” after a silence in which I heard only her high heels on the sidewalk, “I didn’t want to use that to make him think he loved me.”

  I didn’t want to use that to make him think he loved me.

  Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare. Julia had just told me that she knew she might care more about Crunch than Crunch could ever care about her, and she had also told me how much she loved, or had loved, her father. She had taken it all on; she ha
d taken on too much.

  I had tried to tell her something like this in the restaurant. With a certain terror, I began to suspect that I might be forced to try to convey this to her again, armed only with myself. Her father was her stratagem, her sword and shield—how could I, or any man, get past her iron determination not to condemn him? For her only other love was her brother, Jimmy, who was, ironically, an absolutely irreducible element of this determination. I could see, furthermore, that Jimmy certainly agreed with me, was unequivocally on my side. But only Jimmy’s death or destruction could bring her father to judgment: and even then, and more than ever, her father’s crime would be hers.

  I almost said, Feet, do your stuff, but I didn’t. I held her hand more tightly and looked straight ahead, down the long and empty street. My hope, or dream, of joy and happiness wavered and flickered. It did not go out.

  I said, as mildly as I could, “You might not have had to use that, or anything.”

  She walked a little more slowly. I held onto her hand, refusing to let her stop or drop back. I knew that she was listening, but I couldn’t guess what she was hearing.

  She said—she sounded young, very young—she sounded scared. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “you wouldn’t have had to use anything to make him love you. Maybe you weren’t listening.”

  “Oh, Hall. You weren’t here, you don’t know what was happening!”

  “You want to bet?”

  “Some things—nobody knows—who wasn’t actually there.”

  “And sometimes the person who was actually there doesn’t know, either!—did you ever think of that?”

  We walked, in another silence, to her stoop. She moved up one step. I didn’t let go her hand. I leaned on the gray, ornately worked metal. She looked down at me with that ancient and utterly vulnerable face, eyes as old as Egypt and as untouched as tomorrow.