Love (10 page)

She remembered the bus ride back, punctured by drifts of sleep flavored with sea salt. With one explosive exception (during which fury blinded her), it was her first glimpse of Silk in twenty-eight years. Neat houses stood on streets named for heroes and the trees destroyed to build them. Maceo’s was still on Gladiator across from Lamb of God, holding its own against a new hamburger place on Prince Arthur called Patty’s. Then home: a familiar place that, when you left, kept changing behind your back. The creamy oil painting you carried in your head turned into house paint. Vibrant, magical neighbors became misty outlines of themselves. The house nailed down in your dreams and nightmares comes undone, not sparkling but shabby, yet even more desirable because what had happened to it had happened to you. The house had not shrunk; you had. The windows were not askew—you were. Which is to say it was more yours than ever.

Heed’s look, cold and long, had been anything but inviting, so Christine just slammed past her through the door. With very few words they came to an agreement of sorts because May was hopeless, the place filthy, Heed’s arthritis was disabling her hands, and because nobody in town could stand them. So the one who had attended private school kept house while the one who could barely read ruled it. The one who had been sold by a man battled the one who had been bought by one. The level of desperation it took to force her way in was high, for she was returning to a house whose owner was willing to burn it down just to keep her out. Had once, in fact, set fire to Christine’s bed for precisely that purpose. So this time, for safety she settled in the little apartment next to the kitchen. Some relief surfaced when she saw Heed’s useless hands, but knowing what the woman was capable of still caused her heart to beat raggedly in Heed’s presence. No one was slyer or more vindictive. So the door between the kitchen and Christine’s rooms had a hidden key and a very strong lock.

Christine braked for a turtle crossing the road, but swerving right to avoid it, she drove over a second one trailing the first. She stopped and looked in the rearview mirrors—left one, right one, and overhead—for a sign of life or death: legs pleading skyward for help or a cracked immobile shell. Her hands were shaking. Seeing nothing, she left the driver’s seat and ran back down the road. The pavement was blank, the orange trees still. No turtle anywhere. Had she imagined it, the second turtle? The one left behind, Miss Second Best, crushed by a tire gone off track, swerving to save its preferred sister? Scanning the road, she did not wonder what the matter was; did not ask herself why her heart was sitting up for a turtle creeping along Route
12
. She saw a movement on the south side of the road where the first turtle had been heading. Slowly she approached and was relieved to see two shiny green shells edging toward the trees. The wheels had missed Miss Second Best, and while the driver was shuddering in the car, she had caught up to the faster one. Transfixed, Christine watched the pair disappear, returning to her car only when another slowed behind it. As she left the verge, the driver smiled, “Ain’t you got no toilet at home?”

“Go around, motherfucker!”

He gave her a thick finger and pulled away.

The lawyer might be surprised—Christine had no appointment—but would see her anyway. Each time she forced herself into the office, Christine had been accommodated. Her slide from spoiled girl child to tarnished homelessness had been neither slow nor hidden. Everybody knew. There was no homecoming for her in elegant auto driven by successful husband. No degree-in-hand-with-happy-family-in-tow return. Certainly no fascinating stories about the difficulty of running one’s own business or the limitations placed on one’s time by demanding executives, clients, patients, agents, or trainers. In short, no hometown sweep full of hints of personal fulfillment and veiled condescension. She was a flop. Disreputable. But she was also a Cosey, and in Harbor the name still lifted eyelids. William Cosey, onetime owner of many houses, a hotel resort, two boats, and a bankful of gossiped-about, legendary cash, always fascinated people, but he had driven the county to fever when they learned he had left no will. Just doodles on a
1958
menu outlining his whiskey-driven desires. Which turned out to be (
1
)
Julia II
to Dr. Ralph, (
2
) Montenegro Coronas to Chief Silk, (
3
) the hotel to Billy Boy’s wife, (
4
) the Monarch Street house and “whatever nickels are left” to “my sweet Cosey child,” (
5
) his ’
55
convertible to L, (
6
) his stickpins to Meal Daddy, and on and on down to his record collection to Dumb Tommy, “the best blues guitar player on God’s earth.” Feeling good, no doubt, from Wild Turkey straight, he had sat down one night with some boozy friends and scrawled among side orders and the day’s specials, appetizers, main courses, and desserts the distribution of his wealth to those who pleased him most. Three years after his death a few boozy friends were located and verified the event, the handwriting, and the clarity of the mind that seemed to have had no further thoughts on the matter. Questions flared like snake cowls: Why was he giving Dr. Ralph his newest boat? What Coronas? Chief Buddy’s been dead for years, so does his son get them? Boss Silk don’t smoke and who is Meal Daddy? The lead singer of the Purple Tones, said Heed. No, the manager of the Fifth Street Strutters, said May, but he’s in prison, can inmates receive bequests? They’re just records, fool, he didn’t identify you by name, so what? he didn’t mention you at all! and why give a convertible to somebody who can’t drive you don’t need to drive a car to sell it this ain’t a will it’s a comic book! They focused on stickpins, cigars, and the current value of old
78
s—never asking the central question, who was “my sweet Cosey child”? Heed’s claim was strong—especially since she called her husband Papa. Yet since, biologically speaking, Christine was the only “child” left, her claim of blood was equal to Heed’s claim as widow. Or so she and May thought. But years of absence, no history of working at the hotel except for one summer as a minor, weakened Christine’s position. With a certain amusement, the court examined the greasy menu, lingering lazily perhaps over the pineapple-flavored slaw and Fats’ Mean Chili, listened to three lawyers, and tentatively (until further evidence could be provided) judged Heed the “sweet Cosey child” of a drunken man’s vocabulary.

Gwendolyn East, Attorney-at-Law, thought otherwise, however, and recently she’d told Christine grounds for reversal on appeal were promising. In any case, she said there was room for review, even if no mitigating evidence was found. For years Christine had searched for such evidence—the hotel, the house—and found nothing (except rubbishy traces of May’s lunacy). If there was anything else—a real, typed-up intelligible will—it would be in one of Heed’s many locked desks behind her bedroom door, also locked nightly against “intruders.” Now the matter was urgent. No more waiting for the other to die or, at a minimum, suffer a debilitating stroke. Now a third element was in the mix. Heed had hired a girl. To help write her memoirs, Junior Viviane had said that morning at breakfast. Christine sputtered her coffee at the thought of the word “write” connected with someone who had gone to school off and on for less than five years. Scooping grapefruit sections, Junior had grinned while pronouncing “memoirs” just the way illiterate Heed would have. “Of her family,” said Junior. What family, Christine wondered. That nest of beach rats who bathed in a barrel and slept in their clothes? Or is she claiming Cosey blood along with Cosey land?

After mulling over what the girl had told her, Christine had retreated to her apartment—two rooms and a bath annexed to the kitchen, servant’s quarters where L used to stay. Unlike the memory-and-junk-jammed rest of the house, the uncluttered quiet there was soothing. Except for pots of plants rescued from violent weather, the apartment looked much the same as it had some fifty years ago when she hid there under L’s bed. Misting begonia leaves, Christine found herself unable to decide on a new line of action, so she decided to consult her lawyer. She waited until Romen was due and Junior out of sight on the third floor. Earlier, at breakfast, dressed in clothes Heed must have loaned her (a red suit not seen in public since the Korean War), Junior had looked like a Sunday migrant. Except for the boots, last night’s leather was gone, as was the street-life smell she had brought into the house. When Christine saw Romen puttering around in the sunshine, inspecting ice damage done to the shrubs, she called him to help her with the garage door still stuck in ice, then told him to wash the car. When he was done, she drove off, picking up speed as quickly as she could to get to Gwendolyn East before the lawyer’s office closed.

Christine’s entanglements with the law were varied enough to convince her that Gwendolyn was not to be trusted. The lawyer may know the courts but she didn’t know anything about police—the help or the damage they could do long before you saw a lawyer. The police who had led her away from the mutilated Cadillac were, like Chief Buddy Silk, gentle, respectful, as though her violence was not merely understandable but justified. They handled her like a woman who had assaulted a child molester rather than a car. Her hands were cuffed in front, not behind her back—and loosely. As she sat in the patrol car, the sergeant offered her a lit cigarette and removed a shard of headlight glass from her hair. Neither officer pinched her nipples or suggested what a blow job could do for racial justice. The one time she had been in a killing frame of mind with a hammer instead of a switchblade in her hand, they treated her like a white woman. During four previous arrests—for incendiary acts, inciting mayhem, obstructing traffic, and resisting arrest—she had nothing lethal in her hand and was treated like sewage.

Come to think of it, every serious affair she’d had led straight to jail. First Ernie Holder, whom she married at seventeen, got them both arrested at an illegal social club. Then Fruit, whose pamphlets she passed out and with whom she had lived the longest, got her thirty days, no suspension, for inciting mayhem. Other affairs had overflowed and ended in dramas the law had precise names for: cursing meant assaulting an officer; yanking your arms when cuffed meant resisting arrest; throwing a cigarette too close to a police car meant conspiracy to commit arson; running across the street to get out of the way of mounted police meant obstructing traffic. Finally Dr. Rio. A Cadillac. A hammer. A gentle, almost reluctant arrest. After an hour’s wait, no charges pressed, no write-up or interview, they gave her back the shopping bag and let her go.

Go where? she wondered, slinking down the street. She had been manhandled out of her (his) apartment after a two-minute supervised reprieve to get her purse. No clothing can leave the premises, they said, but she was allowed to take some underwear and her cosmetics bag, which, unknown to the lawyer-paid thugs, included a spoon and twelve diamond rings. Aside from the rings she would die rather than pawn, she had a recently canceled MasterCard and seven dollars plus change. She was as lonely as a twelve-year-old watching waves suck away her sand castle. None of her close friends would risk Dr. Rio’s displeasure; the not so close ones were chuckling over her fall. So she walked to Manila’s and persuaded her to take her in. For just a few days. For free. It was a risky, even impudent request, since Manila did not run a whorehouse, as certain sanctimonious people described her home. She simply rented rooms to needy women. The forlorn, the abandoned, those in transit. That these women had regular visitors or remained in transit for years was not Manila’s concern.

Christine had all of these requisites in
1947
. The bus driver who directed her to
187
Second Street, “right near the glass factory, look for a pink door,” either misunderstood or understood completely. She had asked him if he knew of a rooming house and he had given her Manila’s address. Despite the difference between her white gloves, little beanie hat, quiet pearls, and a flawless Peter Pan collar and the costumes of Manila’s girls, her desperation was equal to theirs. When she stepped out of the taxi it was nine-thirty in the morning. The house seemed ideal. Quiet. Neat. Manila smiled at the four suitcases and said, “Come on in.” She explained the rates, the house rules, and the policy on visitors. It was lunchtime before Christine figured out that the visitors were clientele.

She was surprised by how faint her shock was. Her plan was to find secretarial work or, even better, some high-paying postwar work in a factory. Fresh from an overdue sixteenth-birthday party and graduation from Maple Valley, she had landed in a place her mother would have called “a stinking brothel” (as in “Is he going to turn this place into a . . .”). Christine had laughed. Nervously. This is Celestial territory, she thought, remembering a scar-faced woman on the beach. The girls sauntered through the dining room to the living room where Christine sat and, scanning her clothes, spoke among themselves but not to her. It reminded her of her reception at Maple Valley: the cool but thorough examination; the tentative, smoothly hostile questions. When a few of Manila’s girls did engage her—“Where you from? Cute hat. Sharp shoes too, where’d you get ’em? Pretty hair”—the similarity increased. The youngest ones talked about their looks, their boyfriends; the older ones gave bitter advice about both. As in Maple Valley, everyone had a role and a matron ruled the stage. She hadn’t escaped from anything. Maple Valley, Cosey’s Hotel, Manila’s whorehouse—all three floated in sexual tension and resentment; all three insisted on confinement; in all three status was money. And all were organized around the pressing needs of men. Christine’s second escape, initiated by a home life turned dangerous, was fed by a dream of privacy, of independence. She wanted to make the rules, choose her friends, earn and control her own money. For those reasons alone she believed she would never have stayed at Manila’s, but she will never know because, being a colored girl in the
1940
s with an education that suited her for nothing but wifehood, it was easy as pie for Ernie Holder to claim her that very night. So long, independence; so long, privacy. He took her out of there into an organization with the least privacy, the most rules, and the fewest choices: the biggest, totally male entity in the world.