The Color of Family (2 page)

A
ntonia shrugged on her furry coat. That's what she called it, not a fur coat, but a furry coat, because to her that made it sound truer to its vanity. But she wore it because it was warm and just right for a day like this when the wind and cold seemed to be an entity with heart, mind, and spirit. She hooked the coat closed all the way down to her knees, gathered up the Thermos of hot chocolate with one hand, and then wrapped that arm around the Tupperware container of fresh muffins she'd just gotten from her weekly food shopping at the Giant. Those girls out there on the boulevard need to eat something on a day like today, she thought as she positioned the container more comfortably in the crook of her arm. Antonia just knew they couldn't possibly be eating right and keeping themselves up, given their sleep-around life. They had been run off of Baltimore Street and somehow found their way to Garrison Boulevard, landing practically on her doorstep. She'd fed them every now and then, ever since the day she saw the first of these wayward strollers two years past shivering on the corner nearly in her bare bottom.

With her free hand, she opened the front door, fixed the latch so as not to lock herself out, then stepped across the threshold, closing it behind her. She hurried down the porch steps and along the pathway to the street with a quick short gait that made her teeter from side to side.

When she got to the end of the walk, she looked one way, then the other. “They were just out here,” she mumbled to herself.
Then she looked across the street as the number nineteen bus passed by, and there was Jackie. So she waved her hand in the air and yelled, “Jackie, honey.” And when the woman looked over to where she stood waving, Antonia descended the three steps to the curb and said, “Come on over here, honey. I've got something for y'all.”

Jackie darted across the street as fast as she could in four-inch-high stilettos and a stretched-on swath of fabric that was actually a skirt. When she got to the sidewalk, she trotted over to Antonia with an innocence that, in that moment, seemed to peek out from behind the naughty-girl business of fulfilling the carnal pleasures of men. And almost like a giddy girl who'd just seen her mother, she asked, “How're you, Miss Antonia?”

“I'm fine, honey. Now listen, I brought you some muffins here and a Thermos of hot chocolate.” She gave them to Jackie, noticing the girl had no gloves covering her shivering hands. So she scolded, “Where are your gloves, child? You need to have some gloves on your hands or something.”

“I've got pockets, Miss Antonia. I'll be all right.” She opened a corner of the container that held the muffins, took in their aroma, and smiled. “Aw, man, Miss Antonia. Blueberry muffins. This is so nice of you.”

“Well, you take them and eat them. Share them with the other girls if they're around. And keep yourself warm with the hot chocolate.” Antonia regarded Jackie for a few seconds with the heartbroken eyes of a mother. She put her own gloveless hands in her pockets, then said, “Now, you know I don't like what you girls are doing out here. You know that. The Bible says that your body is where the Lord lives, you know. But I brought you those muffins and hot chocolate because you've got to keep yourselves up, and keep yourselves warm. And try to stay safe.”

“I know, Miss Antonia. You tell us that all the time.” Jackie pinched off a piece of muffin and popped it into her mouth, then said, “But you know, Monique went on back downtown. She said it was just too weird being up here near you, since you was her fifth-grade teacher, and all. So it's just me and Gina, but we'll be all right, Miss Antonia. And you know I'm gonna be okay long as I have this,” Jackie said as she patted the pocket of her short, some-sort-of-fur, jacket.

Antonia's mind left Jackie as she stood there thinking about Monique and how it was such a futile exercise, the business of wondering what a child might grow to be. When she thought about the bright-eyed, interested child she taught and the woman that child grew to be, it was anybody's guess what happened between those two points that brought her life to prostitution along Garrison Boulevard. And so as Jackie stared into her distracted eyes with puzzlement, Antonia merely hoped that the lost woman would one day find her way back to the promise of her girlhood; and she offered up an instant prayer in thanks for her daughter, Ellen.

“Yeah, well,” Antonia said, “that switchblade isn't always going to protect you. You just be careful.” And she turned to go back to the warmth of her home. A home, she thought, the like of which these poor lost girls may never know. Bless their hearts. Over her shoulder, she added, “I'll see you later. If you're still out here, I'll bring you some pork chops from dinner. When you're finished with the container and the Thermos just bring them back up to the house.”

“Okay, Miss Antonia. And thank you again. You're our guardian angel, that's what you are.”

“Well, just remember that this old guardian angel can only do but so much,” she said as she climbed the three steps to the pathway.

“Oh, and Miss Antonia? By the way, what the Bible says is: ‘Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?' It's from Corinthians one, chapter three,” Jackie said, grinning with a certain pride.

“It's the same thing,” Antonia said with a thin smile of relief, believing that if Jackie had such an intimacy with the Scriptures, then just maybe that's what she held on to to save her life in the abysmal world in which she lived. “And you need to remember that.” Then Antonia went on her way at a clip down the grand path stretched out before her.

When she got back into the front hallway, she took off her furry and slung it across the settee. She went straight to the living room to finish the work she'd left when she went out food shopping. Taking the chair by both of its arms, she pushed it in a slow tango across the room, struggling as its feet caught against the carpet. It
didn't take her as long as she thought it might to get it the last few inches to the corner by the window so that it could be with its twin, which she had inched there just before she went off to the Giant. It saves money, she reasoned to herself each and every time she rearranged the furniture while her husband, Junior, was away, since reading the paper in either of those chairs by that window in the middle of the day wouldn't require even a speck of lamplight. She huffed and puffed, tripping over her own legs and the chair's, until she and the chair reached the corner. Then she took two steps back and studied her choice. Smiling with pride, she looked over her shoulder to the place from where it had come. At any other time of the year, when Junior wasn't away, the chairs sat together with a lamp table between them just in front of the couch on the other side of the coffee table, pretentiously waiting for someone to sit for tea or parlor talk. Not very useful by her estimation. She and Junior never drank tea, never even bought it. And they certainly didn't entertain enough, she thought, to justify having two chairs and a couch waiting just for small-talk parties. But that's where Junior wanted the seats and lamp table—so that's the way it stayed. Most of the time.

“Ma, we're here,” a man's voice boomed from the front hall, snatching her from contemplation over the furniture.

When she hurried with her arthritic shuffle into the hall and found her son Aaron standing there, she could see her daughter Ellen, a perfectly fine name that Ellen liked to shorten to Ellie, hovering behind him. Antonia noted in the deep-cut lines in Ellen's forehead and her frowning lips, that she was none too pleased to be there, but Antonia went against every emotion that made her a mother and decided to ignore her daughter's annoyance instead of asking what was wrong. She'd soon show Ellen that coming over would most likely be the most sensible thing she'd do all day. And as Ellen stepped out from behind Aaron, Antonia was stunned into a gape-mouthed stare by her daughter's belly, which had grown fuller with Antonia's first grandchild seemingly overnight.

But Aaron, standing between them, held out the Thermos and his mother's Tupperware. “The woman out there asked me to give this to you, Ma.” And after he put them in her hands, he gave her a questioning look and said, “Everybody else in this neighbor
hood is trying to get these women to go away, and you're feeding them. Ma, why do you keep feeding them?”

“Because somebody has to,” she said dismissively as she moved around him. “Besides, no matter what their sins are they have to eat, don't they?” So when she finally made her way to where Ellen stood, she reached out to touch the miracle. “Oh my, Ellen!” she exclaimed. “Will you look at this? This baby sure has grown so nicely.”

“Ma, what is this about?” Ellen said without acknowledging a grandmother's pride. “I'm between patients and I don't have long.” Her voice was saturated with impatience.

“Momma, I've got a meeting with my producer that I can't miss. But you made it sound so important.”

“I know you're both busy, and bless your hearts for coming right over. It's good to have such attentive children in my old age. Why I called you here
is
important.” Antonia walked back into the living room, and she heard her children follow.

But Ellen stopped before she could come fully into the room, being as preoccupied as she was with matters other than her mother's reasons for calling them there. She looked over at the sofa where the piano once stood, and then over to the piano where the sofa, coffee table and two chairs once stood, and her jaw dropped on its own. She put both hands on her belly as if to keep her baby still while the laughter gurgled up from her depth. “Did you help her do this again?” she asked her brother.

“You mean this furniture? Of course I did. You know I always do,” he said in a near whisper to his sister, as if Antonia couldn't hear a word. “You know this is what she does when Poppa goes out of town.”

“Ma, when is Poppa coming back from New Orleans?” Ellen asked.

“Oh, some time on Sunday. Anyway, it doesn't matter. All this furniture, even the stuff in the dining room and the bedroom and the breakfast room will be back to the way he likes it by the time he gets back. I just like to have my home set up the way I really like it for a time. This is the way I compromise, Ellen. It doesn't hurt a soul, and it lets me feel like this is my home too.”

“Yeah, well what are you going to do when Poppa retires from the board down at Tulane? He won't be traveling back and forth
so much. You have to face the fact, Ma, that one of these days you're going to be stuck forever with the furniture the way Poppa likes it without any opportunity whatsoever to change it around,” Ellen said as if she were giving her mother a thought she'd never before had to ponder. “And besides, one of these days all your furniture moving is going to take its toll on Aaron's back.”

“Not to mention her own,” Aaron said. “You should have seen her. And she obviously did more moving after I left, because I didn't put those two chairs over by that window.”

Ellen pressed her lips together so that they curled up on each end. Then she blew out a sigh and said, “Anyway, I guess we didn't come all the way over here to talk about the way you move furniture around behind Poppa's back. What's this all about, Ma?”

“Just follow me,” Antonia said, stepping around an awkwardly placed magazine rack. When she opened the doors to the dining room, she first made certain they were right there behind her before stepping aside with a dramatic show-girl shuffle to let them see for themselves; the only thing missing was the
ta-da.
And she couldn't understand for anything why Aaron and Ellen, wide-eyed, were gawking like two people caught totally by surprise with nothing intelligible to say. “So, what do you think?” she prompted. “They're all here, pretty much.”

The dining room table was spread from corner to corner, edge to edge with newspaper photographs and articles about Clayton Cannon, the concert pianist that Baltimore had claimed from New Orleans. Peeking through the yellowed, frayed edges was the rich cherrywood of the table Antonia Jackson brought from her childhood home in New Orleans to her married-woman home in Baltimore forty-two years before, when she was that much younger and still feeling like a new bride.

What she had there, though, didn't even begin to account for half of the clippings of the concert reviews Antonia had collected on Clayton Cannon over the years. She had friends all over the country sending them to her from wherever he'd played. It seemed that at least one newspaper from every state in the union was represented on that table. If Clayton Cannon was even as much as mentioned in passing in the last paragraph of an article, Antonia had it. And if his picture was in it, it was worth that much
more, at least to her. She had them arranged chronologically, spanning his career from the very beginning as a ten-year-old Louisiana prodigy to his days at the Peabody Conservatory, right there in Baltimore, to the very first time he played Carnegie Hall, and every other music hall before and since. She even had the most recent one from the
Sun
papers, “A Day in the Life of the Piano Man,” written only three weeks before, after Clayton moved back to Baltimore from New York with his wife Susan, and his twin boys Noah and Luke. Twenty-three years it had been since he'd lived there. But Antonia made it the most important point in her life not to miss one second of his.

Aaron finally spoke. “Ma, you've got these clippings spread clean across what you've always told us was the family's most sacred heirloom. This is the only place in the house where we couldn't even so much as rest a tissue when we were growing up.” Then he looked to Ellen as if she had the answers.

“I'm about to do what I needed to do since the first day that boy moved here to Baltimore twenty-seven years ago,” Antonia responded, “that's what this is about, and I want you two to take these, whichever ones you want, just in case something happens to me.”