Temple of My Familiar (15 page)

“A month after Lulu was born, Lissie was all over me. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you love me no more?’ (I guess you’ve noticed that both me and Lissie can talk the old way or the new when the mood strikes us.) Seem like to me I loved her more than ever. Too much to risk putting her in that kind of pain again. ‘Ah, even fucking hurt sometime,’ she said, when I told her how I felt, ‘but if it gets real good, you soon get over it.’ ‘What?’ I asked. Never in a million years had I thought it ever hurt her; though I have to say I did wonder sometimes why it didn’t hurt women generally. Some of them are so small, and their menfolks so huge. ‘Look,’ she say, ‘we got Lulu, we got this wonderful little baby girl that looks just like Fadpa. I thank God for every pain!’ She was rubbing herself all around me, putting her hands on places she used to control. Now, nothing happened. Well, she knew a thing or two about eunuchs and what they can do, and she knew from experience that I could still love her if I had the desire—trouble was, I didn’t have the desire. It was like everything between a man and a woman that had anything at all to do with creating new life just scared me limp. I didn’t even want to see her naked. I didn’t want to see myself. I felt ashamed. How other men could keep beating up on their wives with more and more births of babies was beyond me. It wasn’t beyond Lissie. She wanted more fucking and more babies, too, and the more I said no, the hotter and madder she got.

“Finally one day she run off with the picture taker from Charleston and left me with Lulu. She came back just before their baby, Jack, was born. I never said a word to nobody. Everybody knowed it wasn’t mine. I didn’t call Eula and I didn’t call that hellion Granny Dorcy. I heated the water and laid in the Vaseline. Jack was born fast, just slipped out of Lissie smooth as anything. By that time I had learned a thing or two from Dorcy, and so I had Lissie squat down, holding on to the bars of Lulu’s crib, and I caught the baby as it came out behind her. She was sick, though, Lissie. Weak from slaving in some white woman’s house, poor food, and being pregnant by a man she felt like she wanted to kill. He was married, you see. Had a bunch of children already, the dog. But Lissie was fed up with me and hot for him. Then, you see, trying to get back at me for losing feeling for her made her even sicker than she already was.

“She came back to our bed, her and Jack. ’Cause old Lulu wasn’t giving up her crib. And we picked up our life as best we could—fishing, selling produce and whatnot in the store. I sometimes helped my father make furniture. He was crabby and hard to get along with, but I loved him and I knew he loved me; as long as I didn’t try to paint, I was all right with him. I don’t think he cared much for Lissie, but she didn’t mind. She always spoke up big to people who didn’t like her and she didn’t like either, just to shame them. And she’d give him a mess of fish or a pie just to watch him stammer over his thanks. She was a devil with some people. While my daddy stammered, she would look at him big-eyed and innocent and laugh. Lissie tried to help out in the shop, but my daddy claimed women got in the way. So she stopped that, and instead she sewed and looked after the children, and went out fishing in the bay. They were sweet, happy children, but our house was sad. We seemed to just be going through the motions of living; and even though we loved each other with true devotion, we knew we had lost something precious. The grief we felt was almost too hard to bear. Sometimes, beaten, she’d creep into my arms, or I would creep into hers, and the two of us would just lay together, look out over the bay, and remember how it used to be and cry.

“Your uncle Rafe was my best friend. He had gone into the army, come out, and worked for the old widower, a Frenchman, who owned this house. He was able to buy the house when the old man died, and he was always telling me I ought to come stay with him. This was before he got the job on the railroad, and he was working in a slaughterhouse. It was a terrible job for someone like your uncle, so fastidious and so, you know, mild, but he was big and strong and somehow managed to tough it out for a couple of years. He wasn’t about to risk losing the house—the only thing up to then he’d ever cared a whole lot about. Then, too, the Depression was coming on strong. On the Island, cash money had all but disappeared. Times were hard. There was a lot of sickness among the children, caused by a lack of quality food. We lost little Jack to a cold a healthier baby would have shaken off. I was up night after night with the little fellow. He looked just like his mother, and it was hard for us to let him go. I thought Lissie was going to die herself, she loved him so. After he died, we left our little house and left the Island—it was too sad to stay—but only for a little while, we thought; and we took Rafe up on his invitation and went to stay with him. Lissie and Lulu and me had the top floor, and I got a job as a door-to-door huckster. I peddled fish and crab and oysters. In the summers it was peaches and melons. In the rich white neighborhoods of Baltimore, where times never seemed to get very hard. In fact, for the stable rich, you know, hard times just mean cheaper prices, and so they just get great bargains on everything and do better than ever.

“Finally, and not a minute too soon, for he was sick of so much death, and he said the blood from the slaughterhouse stayed under his fingernails, and that would
not
do, Rafe got the job as sleeping-car porter. Lissie took in sewing and worked in private homes as a domestic, and with all our pay pooled together, we managed. This was a white neighborhood then, like it’s becoming again now, but there were two houses on our block that had Spanish-looking people who were probably gangsters living in them. One of these houses was just across the street from us, and the other was next door. The men would speak to us as pleasantly as could be, and so we weren’t too afraid of them, even though they did make a habit of sitting on their stoops in shirtsleeves, breaking down, cleaning, and reassembling their sizable collection of guns. I think it was their presence that kept the really white people from trying to run us out. They’d pitched a fit when the old Frenchman died and his niece let Rafe buy the house. She lived in France, anyway, and liked Rafe. Really liked him, if you know what I mean. What did she know or care about ‘crazy American race prejudice,’ as she called it, in an accent that did make it sound like the silliest thing. And then, too, Rafe was willing to pay more for the house than any white person would.

“No doubt the neighbors thought the house too fine for ‘niggers.’ And really we
were
there illegally. I don’t think black people were allowed in that part of town back then. But we were so discreet they hardly ever saw us. We never sat or stood on the front lawn, or sat on our stoop; it just didn’t exist for us as part of the house. There was an alley behind the house, and we always went in the back way. But soon another house was sold to lightbright blacks, and another. They didn’t like us either—we were dark compared to them—but we said to hell with them and began to be able to relax a little bit. We kept it spotless, this house, the grass clipped and the hedges trimmed. In the early years we worked on the grass and hedges at night. It was nicer than anything we’d every dreamed of living in.

“Lissie liked Rafe a lot, and he liked her and Lulu. I thought the world of Rafe, and I believe he felt the same about me. I remember telling him all about Lissie and me. I wasn’t embarrassed or afraid he’d misunderstand. He was curious about our relationship, because in his house she and I slept in separate rooms. She slept in the back bedroom overlooking the yard and I slept in the front room that faced the street, with the baby. Lulu, I mean.

“All the passion I’d had for her mother went into my love of Lulu, and from a little teeny baby she could wrap me around her finger. I doted on that child. Lissie was a good mother, but aloof. She didn’t seem to be present for the child. Always off somewhere roaming through the ages. She started seeing the photographer fellow again, not to sleep with—she hated him in that way—but to model for him. He couldn’t understand how different she could look from picture to picture; he said sometimes he couldn’t even believe the picture he’d taken was of Lissie, and just to punish him she never told him anything. He was the kind of ego-bound person who wouldn’t have been able to hear or believe her if she had. She was excited about how each picture would turn out, and I eventually understood that God had managed, with photography, to show Lissie she was right to think she was as many women as she thought she was. It was a big load off her mind to know she wasn’t crazy.

“Life is very different when you have a good friend. I’ve seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don’t often make and keep friends. This is a real tragedy, I think, because in a way, without a tight male friend, you never really are able to see yourself. That is because part of shaping ourselves is done by others; and a lot of our shaping comes from that one close friend who is something like us. It was real special between Rafe and me. I was the homebody, the married husband and father, the painter. Quiet. Needing Lissie to lead me by the hand. He was even physically different from me: larger and taller, and darker, too. I admired him all my life. He was such a bachelor! No woman ever got next to Rafe for longer than a couple of weeks. He’d go at it hot and heavy for a few evenings—but always came home to wind up the night in his own bed—and then one day I’d ask when or whether he was going out and he’d say no. ‘No, Bro.’ And he’d laugh. I’d be glad, secretly, because it meant he’d be home with us. Lissie would make something especially nice for dinner; I would be sure we had a good fire going. And Lissie, Rafe, Lulu, and I would settle in the living room after dinner for an evening of cards and listening to records, of which your uncle always had the latest, because he was a wonderful dancer, too, along with everything else.

“Sometimes I think he would fancy himself too heartsick over his most recent ladylove to enjoy himself with us; then he would settle himself in his room—he had the big bedroom then—and read dime novels while propped up in bed. Rafe was one for dressing gowns and slippers, and I remember he had a fancy blue-and-white kimono, silk, that he said came from Japan. He was elegant! He pomaded his hair, shaped not only his mustache but his eyebrows, too, and he smoked clove cigarettes. No, he wasn’t a fairy; just a man of distinction! He had a Victrola in his bedroom and pictures of several of his lady friends on the mantel, and he’d put on something highly suggestive and melancholy to listen to, and he’d smoke and read and drink the evening away. By morning he’d be cured of
that
particular lady friend, and if it was his day off, he’d be ready to play with Lulu.

“Next to her mama and me, Lulu loved her uncle Rafe. At times I thought she loved him better than us. He was shaved and dressed just so every time she saw him, for she wasn’t allowed in his rooms. The three of us were extremely careful of his privacy. Often we wouldn’t know whether he was home—there would be no sound whatsoever from his floor. And then Lulu would get to dragging her feet as she passed to and fro before his bedroom door, and pretty soon she would say she heard her uncle Rafe gargling.

“We could have moved, but it was pleasant and felt like family being at Rafe’s. In a house where two men cared for her, Lissie recovered from the weakness that followed the loss of baby Jack. She recovered her strength and style, and began to put on a little weight. I could see she was coming into a bloom of womanhood that almost stopped your breath.
Ripeness.
Her eyes took on greater depth from her sadness; her mouth curved in a smile that still held a little hint of the timelessness of pain. Even her brow struck me as somehow humbled, and because of that I found myself touching it more often, brushing back her hair, smoothing out her eyebrows. But the most engaging thing now was the way she talked. It made you think of water, so soft and gentle, but sometimes you also heard the rapids. She laughed more, too, a knowledgeable laughter. There was in her voice and in her laughter a sound that moved me so much: the sound of acceptance of her lot, and ... the sound of gratitude.

“Lissie had forgiven me, because she had understood. She loved me still, but she had let go. And she was grateful to be alive and yet have all she did have. She had me and Lulu and Rafe, for instance.

“She threw herself as much as she could, considering her built-in distractions, into mothering Lulu, who was a born tomboy that kept Lissie running after her. She cared for me the way she always had. She kept encouraging me to paint, and she found a place where my work could be sold to tourists in downtown Baltimore. I wasn’t using house paint anymore, but watercolors and oils, and this was heaven to me. She also encouraged me to take night classes in English and botany that were offered at the new colored high school. The English made it easier for me to talk to people who didn’t always understand the English we spoke on the Island, and the botany improved the way I drew plants.

“Years later there were friends of ours who guessed what might have happened. Friends who recognized the resemblance of our son Anatole—named after the old Frenchman—to Rafe. I know they pitied me. No doubt they thought Lissie and Rafe were having an affair behind my back. This was not the case.

“It had been years since I made love to Lissie, so long I never thought about it or hardly remembered it had been possible. We still enjoyed each other’s company. We might shop together or walk with Lulu to her school. We might hug or hold hands, but we’d always done that. We were back, in fact, where we started with each other as children, before Lissie really began to notice your uncle Rafe. Notice him as a man, you know.

“Looking back, I can see it was bound to happen. Both Lissie and Rafe were knockouts. When the three of us dressed up to go out to a party, even little Lulu went
oooo!
at the two of them. They had flamboyance. Both of them loved clothes, and Lissie liked to be a different woman for every ball. She loved things like sequins, baubles that sparkled, and shawls with tassels and fringe. Rafe liked his white silk shirts, shiny dress slippers, and fur-collared coat. He was the kind of Negro who, when he dressed up to go out, carried calfskin gloves
and
a silver-headed cane. He fancied himself a rogue, and to the extent that he could pull off his adventures before about two o’clock in the morning, when he just had to be home snug in his own bed, he was.