Three-Martini Lunch (6 page)

9

A
few weeks prior to my graduation from Columbia, my mother surprised me by pressing a small nickel-chrome key into my palm and telling me a secret.

This happened in our family apartment in Harlem, but I wasn't living there at the time. At Columbia, I had worked out a way to stretch the scholarship money to afford a room in one of the dormitories, thinking—with that tragically flawed logic of mine—that not living on campus was all that stood between me and making friends. As it turned out, it was a pathetic room and I hated being in it. I was profoundly lonely and I had no roommates to speak of; no one in the housing office wanted to make any assumptions as to how another student might feel about sharing a room with a colored boy. They had resolved this predicament by giving me my own room. I was well aware they could have done much worse by me, and I felt guilty each time I looked at the cramped, windowless space and wondered if my room wasn't really a broom closet they had converted at the very last minute in the hopes I wouldn't notice—or, at the very least,
that I wouldn't be brave enough to raise a ruckus upon making such an observation.

In any event, this rather sad broom closet of a room was where I was when the telephone in the hall rang and one of the young freshmen—I was the only upperclassman on my floor—began hollering for me. “Tillman!” he shouted. “It's your ma on the horn!” I got up from my bed, grateful for the chance to leave my room, and thinking my mother was simply calling to check in on me.

“Miles?” she said. “You gotta stop by the house this afternoon.”

“What time?” I asked, knowing better than to ask the reason.

“I got some errands to run right quick, but why don't you c'mon over now. I be back real soon.”

Her command that I come over was nothing unusual, but her urgency was. “Is anything wrong?”

“No, no, nothing's wrong. But ever since I woke up, I been thinking about somethin' and I needs to talk to you. Your brother's out playing with the neighborhood boys, and be best to talk before Wendell get home.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll see you in a bit.” I hung up and walked back to my broom closet to put some shoes on. The dormitory halls were full of that particular manic energy that occurs at the end of a school year, when half the students are whooping with hilarity over having already finished their exams and the other half are still studying like mad to pass them. It was the season when clothes and books are being boxed up and old hot plates are left abandoned near the trash chutes by virtue of some undergraduate's careless thought that some custodian might want to adopt what he, the undergraduate, no longer wants to transport elsewhere.

Walking from Columbia to Harlem was mostly a matter of descending the hill that separated the stony Gothic façades of Morningside Heights from the green streetlamps and brownstones of Harlem, and the most pleasant route to take was through Morningside Park along the eastern
side of campus. It was a warm day; little beads of sweat tickled my temples as I ambled down the sloped path. A hot day meant, of course, that Harlem would be busy with people sitting outside on their stoops, fanning themselves and gossiping. There would be greengrocers pouring buckets of ice over their produce, pushcarts selling ice cream, and children dancing spastically in front of gushing fire hydrants, cheering and laughing—and, of course, eventually booing in protest when the firemen came to shut the spouts down again. I had these sights and sounds memorized; together they made up my childhood.

“Hey, Miles,” a young woman called to me from her stoop, flirting out of pure boredom.

“Hey, Sherrie,” I called back. “Hot enough for ya?” At this, she rolled her eyes, nodded, and shrugged, all the while continuing to fan herself. Then she gave me that uneasy look I knew well, looking me up and down more critically from out the corner of her gaze. I sensed she wouldn't engage me further. None of my peers from the old neighborhood knew what to make of me, especially the girls. I was tall, I ran track and field; the girls would flirt, but most would stop short of any real overture. I knew on instinct it wasn't because I had a girl, although I did: I had a lovely girl named Janet who I sometimes took out for egg creams and long walks through the little botanical garden at the northernmost end of Central Park, near the Harlem Meer. No, it was because to them I was a curiosity, intriguing but vaguely unsettling.

I was accustomed to their standoffish treatment. In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none. I had been born in Harlem but sent to school on the Upper East Side. This had been arranged when a schoolteacher at P.S. 24 had noticed my “outstanding aptitude” and petitioned a series of Manhattan church organizations on my behalf. Charitable donations were given, mostly by elderly white widows whom I have never met but to whom I have been made to write thank-you letters. I remember the way my former Harlem
classmates used to see the eternal heap of Latin books in my arms and eye the burgundy blazer of my private school uniform with suspicion. That was the first time my life took on a split nature. Little did I know this is all too often what it means to grow into adulthood, and that my sense of self would fracture yet again, and again, in the years to come.

Around the time I turned fourteen, my father died. Capable as she was, my mother could not bear life without a man, and three short months after my father passed away a small tyrant named Wendell had taken up residence on my father's old La-Z-Boy. My mother never took the trouble to marry Wendell, but over the years she began referring to him as my “step-daddy,” a label I more or less accepted despite the fact I never much liked or respected the man. Wendell was a mean-spirited individual whose face was defined by the kind of pinched features that made all who glanced at him do a kind of double take, thinking he had just tasted something bitter. This perception was not wholly inaccurate, for the bitter thing Wendell had tasted was life. His perpetual mood was one of deep aggrievement. In his telling of it, the world was against him and was hell-bent on keeping him down at all costs. He was short and balding—he wore a soiled gray newsboy cap to conceal this latter fact—but he had the kind of wiry, intensely strong musculature that comes from a lifetime of exerting one's body out of pure spite. I will grant he possessed a sizable store of raw intelligence, but his ignorance coupled with his stubborn hatred of educated men meant this mean, sprightly intelligence bucked around like a wild bull in a very small pen.

Being smart only made Wendell angrier about the bitterness of life, and he used his cunning mostly to exact revenge on those he perceived had slighted him. Unfortunately for me, he perceived that I was his chief offender. And now the fact that his hatred had begun to attach itself to Cob, my seven-year-old brother, with near equal force, rendered me perpetually nervous and protective. No fistfight had ever broken out between us, but I spent the latter half of my adolescence lifting dumbbells should one
finally erupt.
Be best to talk before Wendell get home,
my mother had said on the telephone. I hadn't the slightest idea what my mother wanted, but I was happy to comply with her request that we talk before Wendell was due back.

With this in mind, I wound my way through the streets near the park, north into the heart of Harlem, past the Apollo Theater with its neon sign and its marquee bearing the names of jazz musicians preferred by the white weekend crowds in large black letters, followed by lesser-known performers that were preferred by the locals in smaller letters just beneath. I turned a few more corners and neared my mother's apartment on 127th Street. The familiar look of it gave me a friendly feeling, the old brown stoop with its park-green painted rails and tall rectangular windows like the features of a face I knew more intimately than my own. Once inside, I trooped up to the fourth floor, my footsteps pounding a satisfyingly loud beat on the rickety wooden stairs. When I got to my mother's apartment I put my key in the lock, then halted and knocked cautiously on the door, just in case Wendell was inside. When no sound stirred within, I finished turning the key and let myself in.

I sat down at the kitchen table to wait and considered eating one of the apples perched in a bowl in front of me, then thought better of it. Four years ago, when I'd managed to secure my room in the university dormitory, Wendell had reacted as though this development was a personal victory of sorts. During the intervening years, he had grown increasingly prickly about my visits, demanding that I knock instead of letting myself in and that I stay out of the ice-box, the contents of which my mother stocked and paid for but that he inexplicably considered his sole property.

In recent months, my mother had grown even more jumpy than usual about me and Wendell occupying the same room. We hadn't discussed whether I would move back in after graduation. The idea was I'd eventually marry Janet—no rings had been exchanged, but Janet and I had discussed as much—and we'd find a place of our own, but I had to save up the
money first. Despite her abundant love for me, I knew my mother was dreading the prospect of my coming back home to live, even for a temporary time, fearful that the relationship between me and my stepfather would eventually arrive at a point of violent impasse.

I heard the sound of the front door. “Ma?” I called.

“C'mon and lend a hand, Miles,” her voice commanded, breathing hard. I found her laden with grocery bags and moved to lift the heaviest ones from her arms. Together we carried everything into the kitchen. Then she pulled an apron over her head, sighed, and fished something out of the front pocket.

“Here it is,” she said, exuding the same air of terse efficiency with which she had surely executed all of the afternoon's errands, and placed a small nickel-chrome key into the palm of my right hand.

I blinked at it. “What is this?”

“Your daddy gimme that key,” she said. “I promised I would give it to you soon's you old enough.” Having off-loaded her charge, she dusted her hands together with two claps as though brushing away an invisible layer of flour, and turned back to attend to the groceries laid out on the kitchen table. “Woke up with my mind set on that key this mornin' and figure it's a sign. Figure now's as good a time as any. You know, I guess mothers, sometimes we blind to our babies. But jus' lookit you now,” she said, not actually looking at me. “Gettin' ready to graduate. You grown.”

I continued to gaze at the foreign object in my palm with incredulity. “I don't understand,” I said.

“Hmph. Not sure as I do, either,” my mother said, her back still turned to me as she lifted canned vegetables into a cupboard. She produced a knife from a drawer, cut open a gunnysack of potatoes, and counted under her breath.
“Shoot!”
she exclaimed. “That no-good cheater promised me it was always ten to a bag.” My mind reeling with questions about the key, I watched as she loaded nine potatoes into the dark recesses of the larder. “I don't want you to get your expectations up, now. You know how it was
for your daddy when he get sick. He was babbling clear outta his mine. By the end I don't know that sweet fool knew his rightful name.”

My hand trembled. “What . . . what does the key open?”

My mother sighed, and finally turned to face me. “Don't go gettin' no ideas. Ain't no gold bars stacked up in a safe nowheres.” She peered meaningfully into my eyes, as if to will me into tamping down an invisible mountain of wild, optimistic hopes. I didn't harbor any delusions that our family possessed secret riches, but it was useless to say so to my mother, so I gave a solemn nod in acknowledgment. “You remember your daddy always goin' on about his Army days? Well,” she said, her eyes turning glassy and skeptical as she glanced at the key. “When he die, he lay there on his deathbed, his eyes wanderin' all over the ceiling like he seein' nothing and everythin' all at the same time. Then suddenly he looks clear as lightning and he grab out for me. I give him my hand and I feel something sharp and when I open it I see that key. The key's got to do with yo' daddy's journal, see.”

“Journal?” This was the first I'd ever heard of my father having kept a journal.

She shrugged. “He say he kept hisself a record of all the things he did in the war, and all the other soldiers he knew and battles they fought in, and he left it in an old Army locker on his way out to the Pacific. He always meant to go back an' get it so's you and Cob could read all 'bout his adventures, but never had the chance.”

I blinked.

“When he was dyin', he tell me, ‘Mae, we done somethin' good with Miles. He got his funny ways but he bright as the sun. That boy goin' to be a college boy, sho' as the day I was born. When he get done with his schoolin', you give 'im this. I wants him to know my stories, and be proud.'”

“He wanted me to . . .” I paused, trying to fight my way out from under an avalanche of confusion. “. . . read his diary?”

My mother
tsk
ed. “I reckon that's the way of things. My guess is you better go fine it first.” She paused, then added, “That is,
if
there's anything to fine. That's why I say I don't want you to get your 'spectations up, now. Maybe that key don't lead nowhere but to a dying man's loony business.”

She lifted the heavy lid of the stovetop and reached for a roll of greenbacks bound in a rubber band that lay dangerously near the flickering blue flame of the pilot light. “Lucky your step-daddy never take an interest in doin' any of the cookin',” she said, pulling the rubber band off the wad and counting. “There,” she announced, handing me the majority of the roll. “I done saved you up a hunnerd dollars for your trip.”

“My trip?” I stammered. My head was swimming. I looked again at the key and then the wad of dollar bills. Never in my life had I ever held so much money in my hands at one time.