Part 4 (2/2)
”Let me hug you, sweetie!” she said in a m.u.f.fled voice, then drew back to appraise me. ”I can't believe it's really my little Paul.”
”It's me, Flo,” I said, ”it's me. Come back to the land of the living. It's so good to see you! What on earth are you doing in those white clothes?”
”I started workin' at de hospital last week,” she replied, jerking her head toward the red brick building down the harbor. ”I gits off de bus on Locust Avenue and I walks by yo' house every day. I only works mornins. Ain't a day goes by I don't think of you, pa.s.sin' by de house.” She looked me up and down. ”My my, you is some big boy now. I always thinks of you as jes' a little skinny ol' thing. But Lawd, chile, you has growed!” She hugged me again, clasping me to her warm and nurturing self as she had so often during the ten years and more of my boyhood when, laboring in the house during my mother's long illness, she had acquired the mantle of my mother's surrogate, feeding me-sumptuously-keeping me clean, acting as nursemaid and benign disciplinarian, as quick to chastise me for truly rotten behavior as she was to loyally connive at my minor wrongs, sheltering me from parental anger with artful lies. Florence-or Flo, as I called her-had toiled six days a week (excepting only Thursday afternoon) from early morning until far past dark, when she joined the throng of shabbily dressed Negro women stomping down kitchen stoops all over the town, each clutching paper bags of supper leftovers or a can of Campbell's soup (in a process called ”totin'”) that augmented their weekly salary of three dollars.
It was Flo and her sisterhood that often waited patiently in pouring rain to deposit three pennies in the trolley car's coin box or, later, when buses began their routes, a nickel, to reach the ramshackle enclave whose boundaries were made evident as soon as concrete and asphalt gave way to rutted dirt. It was only quite recently, in the creeping dawn of a new social awareness, that the section more or less ceased being called n.i.g.g.e.rtown. She'd been born in the past century on a long-gone-to-seed Tidewater plantation, the ninth daughter of ex-slaves and the thirteenth child born out of twenty, and to me it had always been a miracle that, having had no schooling, she had learned to read reasonably well and even to write, her scrawled messages possessing both a mannerist charm and a hilariously cryptic profundity. All of a sudden, staring into that lively wrinkled face, I was swept by two emotions in excruciating conflict: love, intense love for this sweet shepherdess of my childhood, and shame-shame that in the many months of my homecoming I had neglected to seek her out.
”I was three years in the Marine Corps, Flo,” I said. ”They put some weight on a guy.”
”I heard you was a marine,” she replied. ”Dat is some bunch of brave boys. Did you git yo'self hurt?”
”No,” I said, ”nothing happened to me. But I was a long long way from home and I really got lonesome.”
”Did dey feed you good? Bet you didn't get no fried chicken with giblet gravy like Flo used to fix you!” She grabbed my arm and squeezed it, with a tickled hoot. ”When you was little you could tuck away mo' fried chicken an' rice than three grown-ups. Je-sus!”
”I kept dreaming of that chicken. I was on this island out in the Pacific called Saipan. Not a day went by that I didn't think about your fried chicken.”
”How's yo' daddy?” she asked, and her eyes grew filmy and tender.
”Oh, he's fine. Still working in the s.h.i.+pyard. Still keeping up the same old grind. He likes what he's doing, you know, Flo. He loves his s.h.i.+ps.”
”I misses Mr. Jeff. I misses yo' daddy.” Her words gripped me with a feeling of loss, and also resentment. Once again-Isabel. For after my mother's death Isabel's arrival on the domestic scene had guaranteed Flo's almost immediate exit; it was an abrupt vacuum that created in me near bereavement when, returning from boarding school one Thanksgiving, I discovered that my beloved mammy (if I dared use the obsolescent word) was banished forever. ”A hopeless personality clash, Isabel versus Florence,” my father had explained, trying to comfort me. ”Each of them just too set in their ways.”
Now I should have known better than to bring up her name. ”He seems happy with Isabel, Flo. She knows how to take care of him.”
Flo glowered suddenly and there was acid in her voice. ”Hmpf. Dat lady ain't got no soul, chile. No soul at all. You lucky you was a marine.”
I changed the subject. ”So what are you doing at the hospital?”
”Ise an attendant for de old folks,” she replied with a slight air of mockery. ”I does de bedpans and I cleans up de barf. Dem old folks is always barfin' everywhere. But I has to make some money. My two boys is over in Portsmouth at de navy yard, and dey gives me some money but it ain't much.” As she spoke I felt pain at the thought of her comedown in dignity-the truly inspired culinary artist, the onetime chatelaine of a tiny but contented household brought so low, squatting on her hands and knees upon a grungy floor, swabbing up barf. ”But I makes do,” she added.
”Well listen, Flo, I hope to see you sometime, I really do. I have thought of you so often and I just failed-” I broke off in embarra.s.sment. ”Maybe we could get together.”
”Oh Lawd, chile, I'd love to see you. Ise home every day excep' de mornins. Same old house. I ain't got nothin' to do except listen to de radio. I loves my soap operas. Life Can Be Beautiful, Guidin' Light, Right to Happiness, all of dem.” She gave a giggle. ”Ise a soap opera fiend.”
I hugged her again and then she turned and was gone toward the hospital, leaving me in a fierce momentary tussle with anger and the blues and dealing with a crowd of memories. Then I gave thought again to my morning schedule.
Parked on the street outside the house was my father's Pontiac. The car, which was at my disposal most of the time, was central to the routine I'd established for myself that summer. Most mornings I'd drive up to a pleasant neglected park on the James River, a quiet place where enormous hovering sycamores provided a dappled shade for some rickety but functional picnic tables. There in this nearly deserted s.p.a.ce I'd sit with a yellow legal pad and a bunch of sharpened pencils and scribble away at what I deemed to be my ”creative writing”; the awkward but heatedly felt short stories I was setting to paper were the result of the authorial virus I had contracted my first year in college, leaving me with a chronic fever that plainly was not about to subside. I'd been emboldened to further effort-no, it was sometimes a quiet delirium, so high were my hopes-by the not quite acceptance of a sketch I'd submitted to Story magazine, that paragon among short-fiction outlets, whose reader had appended to my rejection slip the electrifying postscript Do try us again! How intoxicating to me were the exclamation point and the imperative quality of that superfluous ”do”; for days I repeated the words like a mantra. I took novels along with me-Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Cather, Wolfe. Alternating writing and reading made the mornings pa.s.s quickly, and there was always the mesmerizing prospect of the James, six miles wide here at its mouth and a river so much a part of an essential chapter of American history that even I, who all my young life had swum in it, sailed upon it, caught crabs in its shallows, even once nearly drowned beneath its brackish waves, could find myself freshly amazed at the fantasy it evoked.
There was scarcely a time, gazing out on that expanse (too sluggish and muddy to qualify as majestic but still a serious waterway), that the freighters and tankers lumbering upstream didn't vanish before my sight and a single tiny vessel float into view: that Dutch galleon tacking against the wind, heading for Jamestown with its chained black cargo. In a cla.s.sroom moment I would never forget I listened to Miss Thomas, our distant and opaque sixth-grade teacher, blurt out part of a history text (In 1619, known as the Red Letter Year at the new English settlement, a s.h.i.+pment of slaves arrived, transported from Africa ...), never taking her eyes from the book, her voice a mechanical mumble, the bland-faced spinster completely oblivious of the great stream just outside the window which had borne this craft to its cosmic destination. Wasn't it right out there? I called out suddenly, interrupting her, startling my cla.s.smates. Wasn't what? she replied, startled too. The Dutch s.h.i.+p that brought the slaves. For an instant I'd seen it, the galleon, its c.u.mbersome hull high in the stern, dingy, sails set, wallowing westward through the river's undulant swells. Why yes, she said firmly, I suppose so. I suppose it was out there. She returned to her page, obviously annoyed. The kids whispered together, eyeing me suspiciously. I felt a sudden flush of embarra.s.sment, wondering at the apparition on the river, and at the reckless, almost angry compulsion that had caused me to try to make my dull-witted teacher come alive to the spirit of the past spooking this ancient sh.o.r.eline.
I couldn't explain why, but Negroes and their teeming presence in my boyhood-the whole conundrum of color and slavery's cruel bequest-had begun to absorb me, battering on my imagination and forcing me to express the mighty grip that black people had on my heart and mind, moving me to scratch it all down in the apprentice stories I sweated over day after summer day at the picnic table by the James. I had just embarked on a trip to Faulknerland-Light in August was my first exposure to his stormy rhetoric, and I was smitten. My G.o.d! I saw immediately how riven by the torment of race this writer must have been, from the very dawn of his life. He intimidated me with his talent, to the point of making me wince as I marveled at his incantatory rhythms; I knew I could never approximate his gifts, or the surging energy, but the great tragic themes he tackled-of race and mingled blood and the guilt imprinted on the souls of white southerners-were ones that challenged me, too.
I'd work for three or four hours on my raw little tales-about Lawrence, my favorite black barber, or the wisdom of Florence; or once, in an essay in horror far beyond my depth, about a lynching in North Carolina my father had witnessed as a boy-and then by early afternoon it would be time to call it quits. Time to collect my yellow sheets and my two dozen pencils worn down to the wood, to clean up the cigarette b.u.t.ts I'd left in a litter around the picnic table (compulsive tidiness-”policing the area”-fostered by the Marine Corps), to recap the thermos of coffee I always brought along to help jog up my brain cells-all this before driving downtown to the Palace Cafe for a bite to eat and the pleasure that was, quite simply, my greediest antic.i.p.ation.
I loved the Palace Cafe. And I loved getting drunk there. Its therapy lay in the power of the four or five beers that I guzzled to ease, almost after the first half bottle, the racking misery of my time in the Pacific. That time was never entirely absent from my thoughts, creating a constant gripe in my psyche like a throbbing gut; the effect of a few swallows of the good suds was as a.n.a.lgesic as a shot of morphine. It was what the rustic folk of the Tidewater called a ”high lonesome,” this daily bender of mine. It was a gentle, civilized bender, solitary, introspective, mildly (not maniacally) euphoric, and always cut short before the onset of confusion or incoherence. I prided myself on a certain drinker's discipline.
The Palace Cafe was a barnlike tavern on the town's main drag; the blue-collar s.h.i.+pyard workers who were its chief clientele, and who dined on its pork-chops-and-potatoes menu, had usually cleared out by the time I arrived, a little after two in the afternoon. I seated myself under an outsized electric fan that stirred the heavy air, odorous with pork. I had the place more or less to myself then, and I would dreamily relax in the same greasy booth, listening to the jukebox and its grieving and lovelorn country troubadours-Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells-who could pluck at my heartstrings with fingers different from those of Mozart but, in their own way, almost as deft and seductive. They, like the cold astringent beer, caused the Pacific and its troubles to gently recede, even as ornate daydreams of the future filled their place. It was like a rage: I knew I must become a writer! So I'd sit there and reread my sketches, buoyed toward a vision of myself ten years hence, or twenty when my work had flowered, then fully ripened, and the fumbling novice had been crowned with the laurel branch of Art. While adrift in these largely deranged fantasies I made a concession to the needs of nutrition by lunching on potato chips and pickled pigs' feet, the latter a specialty of the house.
And then there was my favorite waitress, Darlynne Fulcher. Part of the appeal of going to the Palace Cafe was Darlynne and her flirty lewdness, a lewdness neutralized by her (to me) advanced age-she was well past forty-and by her truly daunting looks: big porous beak, spectacles, top-heavy hairdo, the works. A nice voluptuous body offset this enough to make plausible her raunchy style, though at the outset I must have sat in my booth five or six days running, taking scarcely any notice of her, before I heard her murmur, as she plopped down a beer: ”You look like you need some p.u.s.s.y.” It was not at all a come-on; in fact, I realized it was a way to break the ice, to good-naturedly test the bounds of my dogged solitariness. Actually I welcomed the intrusion, since I enjoyed Darlynne's simple-hearted fooling around about s.e.x (”I bet you got a good-sized d.i.c.k on you, guys with prominent noses are well-hung”), while at the same time she understood my basic need to be let alone, immersed in my remedial bath of Budweiser. In the moments when we did talk, during the late afternoon hours as she'd stand there, hands on one hip, patiently shooing away the flies, I discovered that some intimate communion we'd established made it possible for me to say a few words about the war. What I had to say wasn't much though it was more than I'd spoken to anyone before, certainly more than I'd said to my father or Isabel.
”From the first time I seen you sitting here I knew something was eating at you. It's the war, ain't it? Did something happen to you?”
The question required some rumination. ”Well, yes and no, Darlynne.”
”I don't mean to pry, you know. My cousin Leroy was shot up real bad over in Europe. He doesn't like to talk about it either.”
”No, I wasn't shot. I never got shot at. It was something else I'd had a problem with.” I halted. ”But I'd better not talk about it.” After another pause I said: ”It was in my head-my mind. It was worse than being shot at.”
She plainly understood my wanting to drop the subject. ”How come a nice-looking boy like you don't ever have a girlfriend?”
”I don't know. Most of the girls I used to know-the college girls-are away for the summer. Gone to places like Nags Head or Virginia Beach. Or they have summer jobs in Was.h.i.+ngton or New York. Anyway, they're gone.”
”College girls won't give you a good time. You need a real h.o.r.n.y country girl. My baby stepsister's just broke up with her husband, this jerk. She's hot. She really needs a good time. I'm gonna fix you up with Linda.”
It hardly mattered that Linda never materialized, content as I was to sit with my amber bottles and my fantasies, my pumped-up auguries of future glory, and with the thrill of the woeful rapture that always seized me when Ernest Tubb's steel guitar struck the first chords of ”Try Me One More Time.”
Outside I could see the late-afternoon shoppers hurrying homeward. Gathering up my ma.n.u.scripts I'd give Darlynne a hug, swat her on her big rump, and head homeward myself, steering the Pontiac with focused care, untroubled, optimistic from head to foot, deliciously tranquilized. I'd be going back to college soon, and this dismal battleground would be forever behind me.
ELOBEY, ANn.o.boN,.
AND CORISCO.
Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco. These form a group of small islands off the west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, and I pondered them over and over again when we returned to Saipan, where I would lie in my tent and think with intense longing of the recent past-that is to say, my early years.
During the philatelic period of my late childhood only a few years before, a phase that followed my obsession with raising pigeons, I had somehow come to own a moderately rare stamp from ”Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco.” By moderately rare I mean that the Scott catalog priced the one I owned, a used specimen, at $2.75, which in those Depression days was a large enough sum to make a small boy's stomach squirm pleasurably, totally apart from the aesthetic pleasure of the stamp itself. A note in my alb.u.m revealed that ”Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco” was under the governance of Spain, more specifically Spanish Guinea. The stamp portrayed a ”vignette,” as Scott always described the world's scenic views, of a mountain peak and palm trees and fis.h.i.+ng boats in a tropical harbor; the general coloration was green and blue (or, according to Scott with its painterly precision, viridian and aquamarine), and there was a t.i.tle beneath: Los Pescadores. Keen-eyed, I had no trouble picking out the fishermen themselves, who were Negroes and wore white turbans and were busy at work tending their nets against a backdrop of aquamarine harbor and viridian mountains, behind which the sun appeared to be setting. There were other stamps in my collection that I greatly admired-a huge Greek airmail in gorgeous pastel facets, rather like stained gla.s.s; a gaudy number from Guatemala featuring a quetzal bird with streaming tail feathers; a glossy octagonal from Hejaz festooned with Arabic script; the Nyasaland triangle, shaped to accommodate spindly-legged giraffes-but none so arrested my imagination or so whetted my longing for faraway places as the one from that archipelago whose name itself was an incantation: Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco.
Back on Saipan I found myself an unwilling visitor to one of those faraway places of my stamp collection and yearned for nothing better than to be stretched out on the floor of the living room, merely dreaming of one of those places rather than being actually in one. In the tent, half-drowsing in the wicked heat, I would convert my ident.i.ty into that of a small boy again, re-creating in memory ever younger incarnations of myself. In the stamp collection sequence, for example, it would be Sunday afternoon: sprawled on the crimson rug I would lick little cellophane hinges while my mother, her steel-braced leg propped on a stool beneath an afghan, read the sepia-tinted rotogravure section of the New York Times, and my father, seated at the antique walnut secretary, penned one of his innumerable letters regarding the Whitehurst family genealogy. Warm, too warm (for in the winter my mother was always cold), the room contained the lingering smell of the roast chicken we had eaten for Sunday dinner, and the whole sunny s.p.a.ce, coc.o.o.n-like, was wrapped in layers and layers of sound: the New York Philharmonic from the table-top Zenith radio. Forest horns and kettledrums. Swollen ecstasy. Johannes Brahms. Sunday's murmurous purple melancholy.
Another scene from a younger time: my father alongside me as we lay at the edge of the bank above the muddy James. He was teaching me to shoot. The .22 bullets were greasy to the fingertips, the odor of burnt powder both sweet and pungent as the casings flew from the chamber. Squeeze slowly, he would murmur, and my heart would skip a beat when I saw the green whiskey bottle turn to flying shards in the sand. Younger, much younger, I felt the ceramic bowl chill against my legs while he taught me accuracy in peeing. Stand close, son were his words; hit the hole. I couldn't locate any memories of my father earlier than this, nor of the protectiveness and safety he embodied for his son lost in the Pacific distances. Anything earlier than this would have meant oblivion, prememory, only my father's seed and my mother's womb. And that womb, likewise protective and safe, was from time to time another place I longed for in the persistent ache of my dread.
For in truth the embryonic fear I'd felt on the s.h.i.+p had swollen hugely. I was scared nearly to death. While previously Okinawa had been an exciting place to dream about, an island where I would exploit my potential for bravery, now the idea of going back there nearly sickened me. Thus I found myself in a conflict I had never antic.i.p.ated: afraid of going into battle, yet even more afraid of betraying my fear, which would be an ugly prelude to the most harrowing fear of all-that when forced to the test in combat I would demonstrate my absolute terror, fall apart, and fail my fellow marines. These intricately intertwined fears began to torment me without letup. And though I continued my jaunty masquerade, more often than not dread won out. And when that happened I would seek my tent, if I had the chance, and lie on my cot gazing upward at the st.i.tch and weave of the canvas, and try to exorcise the dread, whispering: Elobey, Ann.o.bon, and Corisco.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE.
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