Three-Martini Lunch (7 page)

“Yes, indeedy, son. That locker he mention gotta be at an Army base som'ere out in Californ'a. He deploy there, but he don't come back through the same facility, on account o' his early discharge. I 'spect that's the place he meant. That's a start.” She pointed to the bills. “But you best save up more. Might take you some time to do the lookin', and I hear Californ'a an expensive place.”

“You want me to go to California?” I found that my brain, meticulously educated though it had been, often had to work hard to catch up with my mother, whose shrewd, all-business mind often shot right through the most complicated details at lightning pace. “But what about Janet?” I stammered.

“Janet already waitin' for you, son,” my mother said. “She wait some more.” She sighed. I knew my mother was not overly fond of Janet. Janet, like me, was something of an outsider within our neighborhood, and the same thing—education—that made my mother so proud of me was the very attribute that caused my mother to label Janet “uppity.” But at the same time she was impatient for me to marry, and she couldn't understand why I was dragging my feet.

“See here,” my mother said now, taking my face between her hands. Her palms were dry and warm against my cold, clammy cheeks. “You go look for yo' daddy, you have yo'self an adventure! An' maybe when you come back, you be ready to do some plannin' finally. It's time someone lit a fire under yo' ass, my boy! Get you to makin' some choices in yo' life! If that girl won't do it, I will.”

I tried to look her in the eye, but eventually I glanced away and stared at the chipped tiles and permanently soiled grout of the kitchen floor, afraid to let my fear show. There had been rumors surrounding my father's discharge—rumors that had swirled through the neighborhood but that I'd never discussed with my mother—and the idea of my father's words sitting somewhere in a footlocker choked me with excitement, but it felt like the dangerous kind of excitement, the kind that could lead to deep disappointment. I bit my lip and didn't know what to say. My mother's posture relaxed and she heaved a sigh.

“Will you think on it?” she asked.

I nodded. “I'll think on it,” I said, and reached to hand the wad of dollar bills back to her.

“No,” she said. “You hold on to that. You gon' need it. I know you come around.”

W
hen my mother handed me a key and told me to go look for my father, she of course did not mean look for his body. We both knew where that could be found: buried in a remote corner of the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, by that time for some seven years. My father had been accorded a military funeral, and this had left a deep impression on me. I was fourteen and overwhelmed by what I saw that day, mesmerized by the bugler who played taps and downright baffled by the riflemen who shot off a rigid, violent, earsplitting salute to a man who I'd rarely ever glimpsed in an Army uniform. Later, my mother never let me forget: he'd served with the Harlem Hellfighters during the First World War, and was one of only a handful of Negro men who had the distinction of having served during both wars. “Don't you forget,” she would say, “yo' daddy a war hero.” I did, however. I did forget.

It was difficult to picture. According to my mother, my father, a mature-looking teenager, had lied about his age to enlist at age sixteen. He had seen trench warfare in France, but of course this was long before I
was born. In all the time I knew him, he was a sweet, doddering man who worked at a radio repair shop on 125th Street. The fact he remained active in the National Guard was a detail I mostly forgot about, only to be abstractly reminded when he disappeared one weekend a month to do his service. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and my father's regiment was reactivated, I was flummoxed to watch him pack his bags and ship out. He may have been a precocious teenager in the First World War, but the man I knew when the Second World War broke out seemed to me to be too old, too kind, too fatherly; what on earth was this peaceful, soft-smiling man going to do in the war?

I didn't have to wonder about this question for very long. Two months after he left, he came back to us from Okinawa in plainclothes, having been abruptly given an honorable discharge. My father never discussed the reason—not with me, at least—but in the years that followed his death, my mother insisted it was on account of disability. It was his lungs, a respiratory complaint he'd picked up in the gas-filled trenches of the Marne that ultimately rendered him useless in the humid South Pacific. There wasn't a government man alive, my mother used to say, who wanted to be responsible for a used-up forty-year-old colored soldier whose lungs weren't working right. Whatever the reason for his discharge, it seemed to drain a little bit of his spirit out of him. He seemed to be overwhelmed by some sort of nebulous, unnamed sadness.

I possess only a dim memory of the day he returned; I remember thinking it was funny that he knocked on our front door as though he did not live there, and that his clothes were filled with a mélange of strange odors I later came to identify as the olfactory cocktail that makes up the scent of travel: cigarettes, stale beer, mothballs and musty upholstery, fried food. He came home, but never completely. Thereafter, he spent the bulk of his hours in the same threadbare flannel trousers and dingy white undershirt, listening to radio dramas and coughing a small piecemeal
rainbow of red and yellow fluids into a handkerchief. He didn't talk about the Pacific, but sometimes he told stories about his glory days in France. I am ashamed to say I was dubious of these stories. I didn't pay very close attention, listening to them with the same indifference I had for his frequent retelling of the various plot twists that had occurred earlier in the afternoon on
Ma Perkins
and
Young Doctor Malone
. I have a vague memory of him talking about what it was like to be colored and in the Army, about what it had been like to fight alongside the French and to see the English Channel.

I remember my father best with a soft expression and a grizzled beard—prematurely grizzled, I now realize (he was only in his late forties when the cough began to get the best of him). He didn't bring home anger, or any traumatic traces of the bloody battles he'd seen. There were no night terrors, no trembling hands. Quite the contrary: Despite my father's respiratory ailment, I can only conclude he evidently still had enough breath in him to sweet-talk my mother, as a few years after he came back from Okinawa, Cob was born. If anything, my father was lacking only in assertiveness. An honorable discharge meant he was eligible for the G.I. Bill, but my father took advantage of none of it. He sat in his chair, friendly enough yet inert, worrying the upholstery of the armrests with his restless thumbs and smiling a dazed smile at my school reports. I moved around him in our cramped living room as though he were a piece of forgotten furniture.

As much as I found him a kind and patient man, a vague air of shame followed him wherever he went. I could not puzzle it out. I could not puzzle it out, that is, until one day when I was eleven and a man named Clarence came knocking on our door.

“Mel-vin Till-man!” Clarence sang out in a slurred voice when my father answered the door. “Got a hug for an old war buddy?”

I remember watching Clarence, shiny with perspiration, ripe with body
odor and visible dirt on his clothes, lurch for an embrace. I was vaguely horrified, but my father tolerated and even hugged Clarence back, clapping him on the back. He invited Clarence in and offered him a beer, which Clarence happily accepted.

“This here yo' boy?” Clarence asked when they had settled into the living room, where I was curled up in an armchair, reading a book.

“Miles, say hello to Clarence,” my father said, nodding. “Clarence was a Hellfighter like yo' old man. One of only a few fellas who lasted in the Guard as long as I did!”

I shook hands timidly, then pretended to resume my reading, hoping they would permit me to stay so I could eavesdrop a little. I couldn't understand how or why my father was friends with a man who, had I seen him outside on the street, I would've taken for a vagrant and a wino. They caught up on old times. It was plain Clarence wanted something, but was putting on some sort of mad tap dance. Finally, once the beer ran out and the conversation wound down, Clarence darted his eyes over to where I was still pretending to read, then looked back at my father and cleared his throat.

“I ain't gonna lie, times has been rough,” Clarence said. “I wouldn't mind some of yo' good hospitality, Melvin. I wouldn't mind it one bit.”

My father hesitated. I knew he was thinking of what my mother would say.

“You remember how I was always on yo' side, don't you, Melvin . . .” Clarence said, pressing my father in a low voice. “'Bout all tha' business surrounding yo' discharge . . .”

I looked up, and my father's eyes shot to my face.

“We don't need to discuss that, Clarence,” he said quickly. I could see there was something between them that had caused my father to recoil. “I sup'ose we can always make room on our sofa,” my father said, as though to change the subject. “Mae won't mind.”

•   •   •

B
ut of course my mother
did
mind. She let Clarence stay, but late at night I heard my parents arguing in hushed voices. My parents rarely argued, and the sound of it put me on edge. I couldn't sleep, and decided to creep quietly into the kitchen for a glass of milk.

It turned out, creeping quietly was unnecessary; our houseguest was awake. The light was on in the kitchen. I found Clarence rummaging through the ice-box. He spun around when he heard me come in.

“A'most gave me a case o' palpitations, boy!” he scolded. He straightened up and looked me over from head to toe. “Say, you oughta be able to tell me: Whatchu got in here worth eatin', son?”

I shrugged. “You could fry up some eggs.”

He shook his head. “I don't wanna wake up the house with all that sizzlin' grease and cookin' smells,” he said. When he talked, I could see his teeth and tongue were slightly purplish, as though stained by wine. I wondered where he'd gotten it. He'd told my father he was down on his luck and flat broke.

“Ma made some ham-and-potato casserole,” I said.

“That'll do.”

I skirted around him to retrieve a glass of milk, my stomach turning at the rancid smell of cheap, sugary wine sweating through his pores. My mother didn't allow food or drink in any room but the kitchen, so I sat down dutifully at the table, trying to finish the glass I'd poured as quickly as possible. Clarence scooped a mound of cold potato casserole onto a plate, helped himself to a fork, and sat down across from me.

I watched him eat, bits of slobbery cheese sticking to his unkempt beard. He caught me watching him—very likely a disgusted expression on my face—and looked up. A hostile, wicked smile slowly stretched over his features.

“Yo' daddy ever tell you 'bout his Army days?” he asked.

“I suppose,” I said, shrugging.

“I bet he din' tell you ever'thin'.”

I finished my milk and moved to wash the glass and go to bed.

“Now, hang on a minute there, son,” said Clarence. He refreshed his plate with a second helping. “Don' rush off. Chew the fat with me a bit.”

I didn't want to, but I sat down, feeling arrested by Clarence's demand.

“Tell me about you. You gotta girl yet?”

I shook my head.

“Guess you still too young to be much interested in that yet. What's yo' best subject in school?”

“Latin,” I replied. This was true; I had worked so hard to catch up to my private school peers, I had surpassed them.

“
Latin!”
Clarence hooted. “What's a nigger boy like you doin', fooling around with Latin?”

I stiffened at the slur and didn't answer.

“When they start teaching Latin at ol' P.S. 24?” he asked, still laughing at my expense.

“They don't,” I said. “I go to Warner Academy.”

At this, Clarence stopped laughing and narrowed his eyes at me. “What's that?”

“Private school,” I said. He proceeded to ask me questions about my schooling, and I haughtily explained the circumstances.

“Huh,” he grunted when I'd finished my explanation. “Sounds to me like you think yo' better than us, boy.” I widened my eyes at the accusation. “Yeah,” he continued. “I see the way you been lookin' at me, actin' like I'm gonna give you a case of them head-bugs or somethin' . . . You think yo' shit don't stink.”

By this point, his eyes had turned eerily black and the expression on his face had grown hard and bitter.

“But I'll tell ya something, boy . . . you may think yo' something special,
but you just a chip off the ol' block. Your mama tell you your old man a war hero. Sure—he march up Fifth Avenue in that fool parade with the rest o' us, but that about it. He ain't seen no action in the Pacific. Ever'body know yo' father discharged for bein' a coward and a thief.”

“He saw action in France in the first war,” I said, “and he was discharged for his health.”

“Hah! That disability an act of mercy; they couldn't charge him with nothin' else.” Clarence leaned forward on his elbows and licked his lips. The lamp over the kitchen table threw long, ugly shadows down his face, and I realized he was winding up for some kind of final blow. “He such a coward, he murdered a man just so's they wouldn't have no proof o' his thievery,” Clarence growled in a low, confiding voice.

I got up from the table, trembling, and stormed out of the room. I lay in bed for the rest of the night, hurt and confused. I didn't believe Clarence's story; he was a drunk and a bully. Nonetheless, he had struck some kind of chord. There
was
something funny about my father's discharge. A disability discharge made sense on the surface of things: My father was old by active duty standards, and there was no question his respiratory ailment was real. And yet, there had always been something slightly discomfiting, an unanswered question that hovered like a dark cloud. I couldn't shake the image of my father in the living room, his eyes snapping instantly to my face as he rushed to say, “We don't need to discuss that, Clarence
.
”

Staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom, only a ten-year-old boy, I was suddenly afraid to learn the truth, and this fear remained with me into adulthood, long after my father passed away.

•   •   •

C
larence stayed with us for a full month, well past the point of his welcome, as far as my mother was concerned. Late at night, I could hear her complaining about him, leveling some kind of accusation I could
never make out, not even with a water glass pressed against my bedroom wall.

As my mother's resentment mounted, eventually my father had a falling-out with Clarence, and I assumed it had to do with her objections. I could never be certain what the straw was that broke the camel's back. I caught a few fragmented lines of the final fight between my father and Clarence, but they were cryptic, my father demanding over and over again, “Explain to me what these bars doin' in yo' things!” Clarence, for his part, adopted a stance of indignation over the violation of his privacy, until finally he gathered his belongings and I heard the front door slam.

I never knew what my father meant by
bars
. It didn't make sense. As far as I could tell, Clarence hadn't stolen anything from my parents, apart from copious amounts of food and beer.

Either way, Clarence must have left the neighborhood not long after leaving our apartment, because although I expected to cross paths with him at some point, I never saw him again.

•   •   •

A
fter the incident with Clarence, I avoided the subject of my father's discharge at all costs. I never asked my father anything about his years of service; I never asked my mother, either. I pushed Clarence's words to the back of my mind, where they remained for years, until my mother turned to me that hot afternoon in June and handed me a key.

“Aren't you afraid to go all the way across the country to California?” Janet asked me as we sat at a drugstore counter on 125th Street once I had announced my plan.