Temple of My Familiar (5 page)

Sprawled on its downy softness, the frilly throw about his shoulders, his back against the lacy, crunchy-sounding pillows, his eyes drowsy from the coal fire in the fireplace and the glass of Dry Sack he permitted himself in the evening, Suwelo experienced a sense of well-being that stunned him. In fact, if anyone could have seen him, his owlish eyes fixed on the fire, his mouth relaxed, his body limp, they would have said he
looked
stunned, as if someone had hit him once, sharply, over the head and he’d laid himself out to recover.

It was in his idleness that he began to notice how much his uncle Rafe had scribbled. On book jackets and in margins, on notepads and even on some of his medicine-bottle labels. Suwelo imagined him—he hadn’t seen him since he himself was in college, nearly twenty years ago—a doddering, muttering old coot, a bachelor, reading about the world but slowly losing a place in it, conversing by writing his little notes.

“No good. Strained. Trite. Could do better myself.” A scribbled blurb on a book by Ernest Hemingway. “Big bluster. He-Man,” followed on the back flap.

“President nuts. Can’t they see anything? Elect a madman. What do you get? Madness.” On an old newspaper, with a front-page picture of Eisenhower, yellowed, ripped in two.

“Between rock and hard place. Colored voter. Two parties but one race running both. White one.” On the cover
of Life
.

At first these little messages of his uncle’s simply amused Suwelo. Though he was himself approaching middle age, he held the view common among relatively young people that old people get no closer to being real than caricature.

“Lissie called me up today. Crying. Some crackers hurt her feelings. Bus was crowded with white people coming home from a game. They made her get off and walk. She was all dressed up in her white lace. Was muddied.” This was scrawled, oddly enough, on a shoe box in the master-bedroom closet. A shoe box that contained, indeed, a pair of white, out-of-fashion women’s pumps. Size six. Very soiled.

“Lissie will be the death of me. Must be strong. Damn.” Written, incredibly, on a used linen table napkin and stuffed in the pocket of an old black dressy pair of pants.

“Must tell Lissie not to worry about ...” Here there was no completion, as if his uncle had been interrupted as he scrawled his note on the back of an envelope.

But who was Lissie?

He began, almost unconsciously, to scrutinize the pictures on the walls again. There were pictures of Uncle Rafe as a very young man, just after he’d come up from the Island. It must have been the very first day of his employment as a sleeping-car porter on the Baltimore Limited, the train that “tore up” the tracks between Baltimore and New York City, which Uncle Rafe had talked about as if it were a relative. He was smiling broadly and jauntily sporting his blue-and-red porter’s cap. He’d loved to talk about the amount “she” was fed, what she was like when her “dander was up.” How she “chased the rails.” How none of the other trains could “hold a candle to her.” (What did it mean, he’d wondered, to “hold a candle” to something, especially to a train. How had the expression first come into the language?) Suwelo’s mind used to wander, even as Uncle Rafe grew more excited by the vividness of his memories. His rather somber dark brown eyes glowed, and once he’d said something about a minuscule tip a white millionaire miser had given him, and laughed uproariously, his temples bulging, his head thrown back, mouth open wide, revealing crooked but very white and strong teeth.

Fifty years he’d been a porter. Carrying, mainly, white people’s bags. Sometimes, for his “vacation” on the job, he’d snuck up behind some pretty “brownskin” with “a shape on her hittin’ ninety-nine,” on her way to the sooty Jim Crow car, and insisted on carrying her bag. These were the moments that made his work bearable, and he learned to create such brief encounters, small moments of delight for himself, as the train barreled down the tracks. He got on well with small children (they almost immediately referred to him as “uncle”) and their pets. Young mothers traveling alone doted on him. He was helpful, modest, quick, and definitely knew his place—they could read this easily in his demeanor—because he, like so many colored men, had perfected the art of doing the most intimate things to and for white people without once appearing to look at them. It was an invaluable skill.

At the end of his run his new “friends” pressed nickels, dimes, and sometimes quarters into his palm. There was the occasional half-dollar. He’d laughed, talking to Suwelo and the other relatives gathered around him (and around the mountains of good food always to be found in Uncle Rafe’s house) about how the train’s fancy food, which he had little taste for, was handed out the window to hoboes and how for one stretch during the Depression he’d developed a “paunch,” in which he carried enough prosciutto and roast beef to feed the fatherless family down the street.

“Niggers steal. Yes, indeed!” he’d said, and laughed like a madman.

Suwelo imagined his uncle from his white charges’ point of view. A tall, roundish, though never fat, somewhat somber presence; a being whose eyes were as expressionless as the glass eyes of a toy. (Suwelo thought his own bold but oddly unrevealing eyes resembled his uncle’s. A big brown bear of a man, bending over white people, serving them, for fifty years. The scent of their hair always in his face, their little needs and wants on the ride from Baltimore to New York the impetus for most of his activity, the words “Porter!” or “Oh,
boy
,” his signal to spring into genuinely delighted or, at the least, concerned action. What a nightmare, thought Suwelo, a hellish nightmare. And how oddly moving it was that Uncle Rafe loved food and wine and dancing (he danced beautifully into old age) in his house—the spacious, uncluttered digs of a stone bachelor, or so Suwelo had thought—with family and friends, and could sit and tell of his days on the railroad and not only laugh himself, but have everybody else laughing too.

And the
depth
of the laughter! The way it seemed to go so far down inside it scraped the inside bottoms of the feet. No one laughed like that anymore. Nothing seemed funny enough. When his uncle and his guests finished laughing, they’d seemed lighter, clearer; even their activities appeared to be done more gracefully. It was as if the laughing emptied them, and sharing it placed whatever was laughable and unbearable in its proper perspective.

How he wished he could laugh like that now over the mess he’d made of his life with Fanny. And the cowardice he’d shown in his relationship to Carlotta. Fanny loved to laugh, flaunting the irresistible gap between her front teeth, as if she still lived in Africa, where it was distinctly a sign of beauty; a gap that sometimes pinched his tongue. But he could not imagine being included in the laughter, now. His would be the place of the white miser, the one who exploited; or of the children and their grateful mothers, who nonetheless never
saw.
He imagined Fanny and Carlotta laughing together—at him.

One morning an ancient gentleman, whom Suwelo recognized as one of the two who had attended his uncle Rafe’s postcremation ceremony, rang the bell. He stood there in workshirt, old pants and boots, appearing to dodder. After a minimum of pleasantries—“Nice day. Warm up after a while. How you?”—he announced he’d come to “cut the yard.”

Without a word Suwelo led him through the house and out the back door. Once in the yard he watched as the old fellow unlocked the shed and took out a lawn mower as old as everything else about the house. This he proceeded to push back and forth over the tiny lawn, snipping off the heads of the tender blades of grass in great stateliness and serenity. Suwelo was impressed.

“My name’s Suwelo,” he said when the old man had finished, put away the mower, raked up the grass, and returned the tools to the shed. Suwelo stood beside him as he ran his hands under the water from the outside faucet and used a large yellowing handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his face.

“I know who you are,” said the old man. “I knew your father and mother. I knew you as a boy, before you changed your name. ‘Louis, Jr.,’ we used to call you. Or ‘Little Louis.’” He sighed. “You wouldn’t remember me. My name’s Jenkins. Harold D., for Davenport. Hal, for short.” He smiled. “The children always called me ‘Mr. Hal.’ Pleased to meet you.” He stuck out a moist hand, which Suwelo took, marveling at its smoothness and fragility—the hand of someone who worked two or three hours a month now, at most.

Suwelo offered Mr. Hal a cup of coffee, which was accepted. Mr. Hal sat comfortably at the kitchen table, as if he were used to sitting there. Indeed, when he shifted in his chair and felt the slight unevenness of its legs, he gave the kind of exasperated grunt one gives when a piece of furniture has aggravated one unceasingly for a number of years.

“Mind if I switch?” he asked, already rising from the annoying chair. “That one ...”

“Did you know my uncle long?” asked Suwelo.

“All his life, just about. We was boys together down on the Island. Both of us come from furniture-making peoples. Went off to World War I together, the Great War. Married ...” There he stopped. Looked at his shoe.

He was a rather small man. His head was longish; his hair, that strange shade of gray that seems to be white hair turning black again, and cut short. His mustache was a neat brush across his lips. His skin was tan and of a smoothness common to old people and babies. He had unusually large and, Suwelo thought, fine eyes. By fine, he meant there was in them a quality of patience, of having learned when and when not to speak. Like many old people’s eyes, they had a bluish cast, and the dark pupils were open wide.

“I’ve been going through my uncle’s things,” said Suwelo.

“A lot of stuff to go through,” said Mr. Hal. “He never could let go of nothing. The least little thing he ever got hold of he kept.”

This was said matter-of-factly and in a tone of “I don’t envy you.”

“Oh, I’m enjoying it,” said Suwelo. “I feel I’m getting to know him for the first time. I wish there were names on the pictures around here though. The faces are so expressive. They all look like they’re trying to speak, but without their names I can’t seem to hear them.”

“Most of the women are Lissie,” said Mr. Hal. “The men are different ones. Your daddy. Cousins. Uncles. Granddaddy. Maybe a aunt or somebody else female, but I don’t recall anybody else.”

“But there’re a lot of women,” said Suwelo.

“Lissie is a lot of women.”

“Actually, I’m glad you brought her up,” said Suwelo. “I’ve seen her name around here a lot.”

Mr. Hal studied Suwelo. His large eyes seemed to click over him from head to foot. Suwelo felt washed by the look, rigorously assessed.

“You’ve met her, haven’t you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Suwelo said.

“She one of the ones sometime bring your food.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. He thought of the old women leaning on each other, or turning to wave as they got into their automobile. He loved having them cook for him, and was really quite astonished that they did, but he thought they were too old to be driving a car.

“She wasn’t always old,” said Mr. Hal. “None of us was.”

Suwelo realized with a start that in his real life, the life in California away from his uncle’s cozy Baltimore row house, he was never around old people. He didn’t know that one of the skills they acquired with age was the ability to read minds. For as he sat there, embarrassed, he knew Mr. Hal was reading him. Easily, casually, as he himself might read a book.

“You married?” asked Mr. Hal.

“I was,” said Suwelo.

Mr. Hal waited.

“I blew it. Right now I don’t know what’s happening with us. I’m drifting.”

“I bet she real pretty,” said Mr. Hal.

This sounded false to Suwelo. And unworthy. Mr. Hal was too old to care about mere prettiness. Even
he
was. Anyhow, was Fanny pretty? “Prettiness ain’t what it used to be,” said Suwelo. “Probably never was.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” said Mr. Hal, laughing.

Suwelo laughed too.

“Women,” said Mr. Hal, with good humor.

“You can’t live with ’em and you can’t ... you know the rest, I just
know.
” They looked at each other and laughed again.

Suwelo walked Mr. Hal to a dilapidated truck. Mr. Hal leaned on the steering wheel as if resting his chest while praying for the truck to start. When it did, after much moaning and coughing, he turned to Suwelo.

“When Lissie come next time, you ask her about herself.”

All these old, old people in moving vehicles, Suwelo was thinking, and wondering about their accident rate. Even now Mr. Hal was gunning the motor like a teenager hard of hearing.

“Was she a girlfriend?” Suwelo asked over the noise.

“Better than that,” said Mr. Hal, rolling away. “Lissie was our wife.”

Suwelo went back inside and stopped in front of the first picture he came to. A very young, barefoot, willful-looking woman wearing a long dark dress stared haughtily out at him. She was standing in front of five new, beautiful old-fashioned wooden chairs. The ground was sandy where she stood, and he noticed her dress was patched near the hem. In one of the chairs there was an unfinished basket, the bare spikes of its sides making it look like a large spider about to crawl up the back of the chair.

The chairs were exceptional-looking: tall, of a light glistening wood, with rush seats and elaborately carved backs. He’d never seen anything like them.

He continued to look at the pictures up and down the stairwell, and in the parlors. The young woman with the chairs was the only woman he didn’t know. He went back several times, and could always identify his aunts and cousins, but not the young woman. And then he noticed light oval and square spots where pictures had once hung on the walls. Someone had taken them down.

“M
E AND
L
ISSIE COURTED
from the time she was in long dresses and I was in short pants,” Mr. Hal said to Suwelo a few days later as they sat at the kitchen table over coffee. “It must have started, us feeling something for each other, almost from the time we was babies. You know, or maybe you young ones don’t, but there was a certain kind of living in the country back then that had a lot of advantages. It wasn’t all night riders and scary white people acting ugly. Course, they did that, too; I just come to believe now they can’t help it, and you sort of wish they’d study the tendency. But they won’t, not in this lifetime anyway. Maybe in the next. But they struck you, and if you was a child, after they struck you, and didn’t kill you or run off anybody in your family, or one of your friends’ families, they was gone. Hallelujah! You didn’t really think about them till they caused some more grief. They are the most frightening of all people, and I’ll just be fair: I am afraid of them. They will take what they want, regardless, and that’s what you feel when you meet them. And so I always tried to keep the kind of life where meeting them wasn’t necessary.