The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (26 page)

Bell had fantasized that she and Walter would die together romantically and decadently and in squalor. But turns out Walter wasn’t fearless at all. She had believed in his emptiness and his meanness and his utter disregard for himself and everyone else, but he was a fraud. And if wild, reckless Walter wasn’t fearless, then nobody was. Maybe no one could be passive in the face of death, not even Bell. It’s true that she had taken to her bed and refused to get up again, but that was the opposite of apathy—it was suicide. All of this time she had been wanting to die and wanting someone to die with her, and she’d thought Walter was perfect because most of what was human in him had already been killed by the time she met him. You fraud, she thought. He’d stormed out after his big blow up and come back the next day with a friend to help him move his things. They took everything but the bed. Bell didn’t know if that was an act of compassion or if he just didn’t need it where he was going.

Bell looked around the bedroom. The walls were smudged; the paint was chipping. The carpet was matted and stained. She was seized with the sudden urge to walk to the kitchen—one last walk, one last time to feel her muscles moving and the floor beneath her feet. Maybe something’s living in that refrigerator that’ll give me a little company. Ha! Before her strength gave out, she paid a neighbor boy to go the store and bring her a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. A heel of bread still moldered in the refrigerator. When Bell was a child, Hattie couldn’t afford peanut butter. Sick as she was, Bell had felt a kind of decadence sitting in bed nibbling on a peanut butter sandwich. She wished she could conjure up that neighbor boy now and send him to the store for a can of chicken soup.

What a mess she’d made of things. She let herself want the soup and now a host of other wants marched in by the hundreds. They’d trample her to death, all these things she wanted. What’s that Marvin Gaye says you can’t avoid?
Taxes, death and trouble.
Well, I’m dying and I’ve had my share of trouble, but I haven’t paid taxes in five years. Take that Marvin! Ha! Bell leaned back on the bed. She didn’t know if it was the tuberculosis causing her to gasp for air or if it was the rush of all her disappointments and her mistakes and her loneliness. Bell lifted her hand to her chest. Her heart beat too quickly. She was floating out on a tide of agony, and soon she would be carried so far she’d never come back.

Walter’s eyes used to slide all over the room when Bell had a coughing fit, he’d look anywhere but at her. That bastard. She would give anything for a last glimpse of him, and of her mother. Imagine the two of them in a room together. Hattie would look at Walter like a roach and pretend he wasn’t there.

That soup Hattie made must have been a vegetable broth; there wasn’t money for meat when Bell was a child. It was salty, with little bits of potato. Bell thought of the soup from the Chinese takeout, the warm liquid going down her throat and the firm give of the wonton under her teeth. She remembered a bakery that sold the sticky buns she used to buy years ago. She couldn’t quite recall the taste, but she remembered walking down Henry Avenue with Cassie, holding the warm bun in her hand and pushing down the wax paper so it wouldn’t get in her mouth when she took a bite. Cassie would make them walk all the way home afterward so they could burn off the calories. Bell’s sisters used to take her to dances. She was never the prettiest one in the room, but she’d always met boys just the same. Two had wanted to marry her—good decent men who had families now and lived in nice houses on Tulpehocken Street. Bell had been disdainful of them; she’d thought them small and ordinary. She’d taken such pleasure in saying no to their proposals and breaking their hearts. Women who married men like that did nothing but shop for groceries and nearly die of boredom. But here I am dying anyway.

BELL REMEMBERED
sitting with her friend Rita on a school bus when they were girls of eleven or twelve. They were returning from a school trip, and the bus stopped at a red light in a neighborhood some distance from Germantown. Where had they gone on that trip? Bell had been trying to remember for years. She and Rita were deep in conversation and sitting close to one another with their knees touching in the way that young girls do. The bus jerked to a halt, and they looked up and out of the window.

“Oh! There’s my mother!” Bell said.

Hattie was a young woman then, maybe forty or so, Bell’s age now. Her skin was the color of the inside of an almond, and she had chestnut hair that curled down her back. When Bell saw her, she wanted to shout, “There’s my mother! Isn’t she something!”

In her surprise she didn’t notice that Hattie wasn’t alone.

“Is that your father?” Rita asked.

Hattie walked arm in arm with a tall slim man. They shared the same long stride, the same rhythm in moving down the block, as though they had been made to stroll down the avenue together. The man looked at Hattie and said something. They were intimate and snug and comfortable with each other. Hattie threw back her head and laughed. Bell nearly cried. She’d never seen her mother laugh that way. She’d never seen any joy in her at all. Hattie had been stern and angry all of Bell’s life, and it occurred to her that her mother must have been very unhappy most of the time. She wanted to know her mother as she was in that moment, so beautiful and happy that the bright afternoon paled in comparison. This cinnamon-colored man brought out a light in Hattie that Bell hadn’t any hope of seeing.

“No,” Bell said to Rita. “That’s not my father.”

BELL PICKED
at some lint on her bed sheet. She coughed. How stoic and constant Hattie was, how seething and unfathomable. Bell’s sisters used to say that she had her mother’s temperament—secretive and quick-tempered. She had never been afraid of anyone the way she was afraid of her mother, she had never been so angry with anyone and never wanted anyone to love her as much as she wanted Hattie’s love. But Hattie was always so remote, like the shore receding as a ship moves farther out to sea.

Bell insisted upon her disappointment with Hattie. She reviewed every moment of her childhood and found it full of Hattie’s hands bringing down the belt on her children’s thighs, full of Hattie’s rages and silences. Maybe she was trying to protect her children or teach them discipline and respect, but Bell could hardly remember a tender word or a kiss. Bell missed her. Wasn’t it funny that when she left her mother and the rigors of her house, she had disintegrated bit by bit? She had been free-falling until she landed in this bed on Dauphin Street.

Bell was thirsty. It’ll pass, she thought. My thirst will pass and these waves of desire will pass, and I will become tired. I’ll be too tired to make a fist, too tired to think, and then I’ll go to sleep and that will be that. I’ll lay here and silver moths will fly out of my mouth and then … If the church is to be believed, I’ve done enough dirt to send me to hell three times over. I should be scared, Bell thought, but all I feel is regret.

Bell’s eyes burned and she grimaced as she would if she were crying, but her body could not make tears. She was a husk, like a beetle whose shell is left after a spider has eaten it from the inside out.

Lawrence, as he looked when Bell saw him walking down the street with Hattie all of those years ago, came to her mind. He wore a gray suit and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, no tie and no hat. He was graceful and strong as an athlete. Lawrence wasn’t more handsome than August, but he was a different sort of man. There was something regal and striking about him. He had stayed in her memory like a movie star would. She could see him still as he was then, with a burgundy handkerchief in his breast pocket and the wind pressing his jacket against him.

BELL HAD RECOGNIZED
Lawrence instantly despite the twenty years that had passed since she saw him with her mother. She was still healthy then, she could not have imagined that Walter and tuberculosis were coming in less than a decade. She was buying a hat. The shop girl was putting her purchase in a hatbox when the bell on the door jingled, and Lawrence came in alone wearing a suit much like the one that Bell remembered. His hair had grayed and there were hollows in his cheeks, but he was still fit and handsome.

“That’s a nice one,” she said when he paused in front of a wide-brimmed red hat.

“Do you think so? I don’t know anything about ladies’ hats,” he replied.

“It’s very stylish.” She paused, “Depending, of course on the age of the lady it’s intended for.”

“About your age. Too young, if you ask me, to be wearing grown folks’ hats.”

“I’m sure she’s a woman of good taste. Not many people wear hats these days.”

“I’m glad that you consider yourself of woman of good taste,” he said, chuckling and nodding toward the hatbox in Bell’s hand.

Lawrence leaned toward Bell while they talked. He told her the hat was for his daughter. Bell saw how a man so confident and elegant could have charmed her mother. This man could turn any woman’s head. He knew it; he was sixty if he was a day and he was still turning it on like a faucet.

“I’m Lawrence Bernard,” he said.

“I’m Caroline,” Bell replied. “Jackson.”

They left the store together.

During the third week of their acquaintance, Bell invited Lawrence to a jazz concert. They drank brandy Alexanders. An old man’s drink, she thought. While they danced to the band, she told him that she would like to see his house. After the concert they sat on his narrow front porch drinking lemonade spiked with rum. The April night was cool. He wrapped his arm around her. He kissed her shoulders and took her to his bed. She was prim in her lovemaking with him. Though her eyes were squeezed shut, the experience was not entirely unpleasant, until Bell thought of Hattie. She shook her head violently to rid her mind of her mother’s image. Lawrence mistook the gesture for sexual ecstasy. He fell asleep soon after. She lifted the sheet and studied him; his body was still firm. He was vain—his toenails were clipped and filed smooth, the heels of his feet were buffed. He did not look like an old man in the way she thought he would. His stomach was going soft but was still flat. She was suddenly embarrassed and guilty. She rolled to the opposite side of the bed. Here was her mother’s lover lying naked next to her. She was thrilled and revolted and decided to stay the night with him.

Bell woke Lawrence next morning and pretended to take her leave. She’d wrapped herself with the coverlet as though she were shy about her nakedness. He wanted her again, as she knew he would. He was emboldened by the previous evening. They’d forgotten to draw the shade, and the sunlight made the room as bright as a beach at noon. She offered herself to him on all fours. Gone was the previous night’s reserve. He was almost aggressive with her; the noises he made were guttural and primal. She enjoyed herself with him because she had reduced him to a grunting, rutting man, just like any other man. Bell felt a fleeting triumph. She had her revenge on her mother, though, of course, she would never tell Hattie. She was doing a terrible thing, but in the doing she was equal to Hattie; equal in pain inflicted and punishment exacted. More than that, she had become her mother in some way—not the angry, exhausted Hattie but the laughing beautiful woman Bell saw from the school bus window.

Bell resolved not to let Lawrence turn the affair into a romance, though he continued to ask her to go to restaurants with him or to this concert or that one. If I did not have the upper hand, she thought, I might be smitten. She refused to go on dates with him. Instead, they met on Lawrence’s porch at twilight and ate sandwiches followed by too many glasses of spiked lemonade. Now and again they took his car to the Chinese place a few blocks away and ordered takeout. He talked about the Panthers and how he thought them too violent. “That Huey Newton is going to die, you mark my words,” he said. He might go down to Mississippi or Alabama to campaign for Robert Kennedy. It was the churches that were doing that work now, he said, with nobody to help them. My brother Six has a church down there, Bell almost told him. That fool’s been married for twenty years and has children by more women than you could count on your hand, but that doesn’t stop him from going on about how the Lord would uplift the race if we pray and do right. There’s the Church for you! But of course Caroline didn’t have any brothers, so Bell kept silent.

“I guess I’m too old for all that woolly hair and fist raising. It broke my heart to see regular colored folks, the cook and the farmer and the seamstress, with their regular clothes and regular hair, sitting at those counters. I’ve never seen anything so brave.”

When he asked her questions about Boston, she answered in sweeping generalities that gave the impression of truth. She’d grown up in Roxbury and had an uncle who liked the Red Sox, and, yes, the winters were colder. Most often it was during these lies that he would look at her and say, “It’s the strangest thing. You look so familiar sometimes.” Then he would wink at her and laugh and say, “I must have seen you in my dreams.”

It wasn’t hard to keep Lawrence from prying; he didn’t really want to know much about her, and he was, in his graceful and good-natured way, as withholding about his life as she was about hers. And anyway, they both knew their conversations were a prelude. Bell would have liked to eat their Chinese food upstairs, to lean against the pillows naked and sweaty and slurp the noodles out of the carton. But Lawrence insisted on setting the small table on the porch. What will we do in winter, Bell wondered. Would they eat in the living room or in the kitchen? By then the affair would surely be over. By then Caroline would be called back to Boston on a family emergency never to return to Philadelphia. In a few months, maybe less, Bell knew she’d tire of Lawrence. The skin on his neck was beginning to sag, and his erections failed occasionally. She wanted to be disgusted by these things, but she was not. She had stopped seeing other men, but that was, she told herself, merely because she didn’t have time. She could not deny that he had become Lawrence Bernard whom she’d met in a hat store a few months before and was less and less the man she’d seen with her mother. But that was normal, surely, and didn’t signify that her feelings toward him had deepened.