A Tidewater Morning (8 page)

“You
must
give her more. I can’t stand what she’s having to bear.”

“I cain’t, Mr. Whitehurst,” she insisted patiently. “You must understand that. Please believe me. There is a certain dose—there is—and you mustn’t go beyond that.”

“It’s past endurance, that pain!” His voice rose, at the edge of breaking. “She’s going mad!”

“Dr. Beecroft will be here soon, Mr. Whitehurst,” she replied. “You must please talk to him. I’m sure he’s going to do what he can.” I heard their footsteps as they moved back toward my mother’s bedroom.

In the half-light my eyes roamed around my room, a cramped space, the room of an only child, tidy, organized, with the possessory feel of everything in place, unmolested by any of the brothers and sisters I had for years longed to have and now, in my desolation, longed for with a special ache. The village had many children. It was a place and an era of busy procreation. The houses of the village, small-scale as they appeared, were swollen with vigorous, rowdy families, and my friends all had siblings I envied for the very fact of their being—splendid older brothers, sensible younger sisters; even the little runny-nosed brats at the bottom of the family chain I would have loved to cuddle and protect. Once when a neighbor daughter was killed in a horse-riding fall, I saw the overspilling fountain of love and solace that welled up from the heart of the family, brothers and sisters embracing and hugging, clinging to each other, as if their grief were lessened by simple contact with their common origin of flesh. And for some nights they slept sprawled together in one big bed, holding on to one another, preventing even sleep from separating them in their mourning. In my room I felt as alone as if I were in a dungeon. The heat was malign, smothering, and I gasped like a fish in the darkness. The crack from the door sent a wedge of light against the wall above me with its heroic frieze: the Fordham backfield in Kodachrome. And the edge of my bookshelf, the light bisecting
Mr. Midshipman Easy, The Swiss Family Robinson, Les Misérables, Ferdinand,
volumes one through four of
The Book of Knowledge.
“Gently, gently,” I heard my father say, “oh, please gently, Miss Slocum.” And at the light’s dimmest reach:
FIRST PRIZE, ORAL READING, TIDEWATER REGION, VIRGINIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
. Laurie Macauley had died of a broken neck. No one knew why the mare had bolted; she had been seraphically gentle, a paragon of equine docility. But Laurie and the horse had remained lost in the woods near the C & O tracks for a day and a night, and when they discovered the body, part of her face had been eaten away by vermin, preventing the open-coffin viewing that would have been customary. I squirmed on the wet sheets, thinking: I
don’t understand this.
I felt thirsty—an urgent, serious thirst of the kind that seized me after my newspaper route. I got up from bed and slipped on my pajama bottom, opened the door just wide enough so that I could slide through, and then slipped downstairs on tiptoeing bare feet so that my father and Miss Slocum wouldn’t hear me. The kitchen, like the other rooms of the house, was skimpy and confined; I darted over the ripples of the linoleum floor in three steps, opened the refrigerator, and groped in the dark interior for the jar of ice water. Then I lifted the jar and gulped, my eyes moistening over in appreciation even as I sensed a twitch of guilt. I knew I shouldn’t be drinking from the jar. One didn’t swap germs promiscuously at a time when common infections sometimes spelled doom. Surfaces were wiped clean, made sterile; raw food was triply rinsed and purified. As people moved through an invisible blizzard of evil microbes, there was much random mortality. Mr. Max Weissberger, owner of the leading department store in the town nearby, scratched a pimple on his nose on a Thursday, and by Monday he was dead. On the main floor at the store, near the perfume counter and on the wall between the elevators, a portrait plaque in bronze memorializing Max Weissberger always caught my glance, which was then drawn inevitably to the tip of the burnished nose and its pathetic vulnerability. It could be a scary world, pre-penicillin, but I thought some of those like my mother were overly zealous: the memory of the moment when, still ambulant and sharp-eyed, she let me have it for drinking from the jar was bright in my mind as I gulped away. And my guilt was intensified by everything that was going on upstairs. I replaced the jar in the refrigerator and turned to see the glow from the alcove just off the kitchen, where there was situated a single cot and a lamp. In that alcove, smaller than a jail cell, there was also a cheap tabletop radio so battered and overused that the inner wiring poked out of the Bakelite case; it was playing now but turned down very low, low enough so that I hadn’t heard it until this moment, when I approached, and knew whom I would see sitting there on the cot, listening, just as I knew exactly—or almost exactly—what she would be listening to. I had heard it with Florence a dozen times before. The blurred murmur grew louder, more distinct, defining itself as a voice sweetly insinuating at first but then swelling into wild, strident exhortation:
“Be it known therefore unto you that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and they will HEAR it!”
A massed congregational response:
“Amen! Yes! Amen!” The
sound was that of some prophet whooping and hollering through remote nocturnal distances—50,000 watts vaulting the Appalachians from Cincinnati or Detroit or Pittsburgh: a jam-packed tabernacle, a choir of white-robed angels, a sweating black divine reaching out to believers across the miles of ether. Florence, squatting on the edge of the cot, looked up startled when I appeared, and said, “Sonny, sonny. Paul, baby, you should be asleep.”
“Heal dem, Jesus, HEAL dem!”
She switched the radio off.

Throughout the last several years Florence had spent the night in the alcove—as she was doing now—whenever my father had to be away, a rare happening, or during some bad turn in the steadily declining health of Miss Adelaide, as she called my mother. Ordinarily, if I was up this late, I would sit and listen with Florence to these evangelical jamborees. I loved them, although I would never have admitted this to my friends. I loved them mainly for the music. The hysteric preaching was beyond my grasp, but the singing stirred my blood, thrilled me, aroused in me a latent sense of Christian joy and glory long stilled by “Abide with Me” and other such whiney Presbyterian solicitations. When the faroff choirs burst into gospel hymns like “Precious Jesus” and “Didn’t It Rain!” I got a charge that began to encircle my bottom and then moved straight up my spine to my skull, where it climaxed in a mini-electrocution, setting all the hairs of my scalp on end. Most of the time Florence and I would listen together, she nodding and mouthing the words, and she’d squeeze her eyes shut and press her bony brown hand into mine. But tonight there was silence after she turned the radio off. I sat down beside her, hearing the hum of the refrigerator and the shrilling of the katydids in the sycamore trees.

I saw her roll her eyes toward the room upstairs. There was something hesitant in that glance, hesitant and fearful, as if she were anticipating once more a repetition of the scream that had sent me diving into my pillow. Then her eyes softened and she said to me: “We done had some happy times in dis yere house. Sad times but happy times too. You got to remember de happy times, baby.” She paused. “You gettin’ so old I got to stop callin’ you baby.”

“When was a happy time, Flo?” I said.

“Well, day was yo’ birthday ‘bout three years ago, before yo’ mother fell down and broke her leg and had to put on dat brace and all, when we all went to Buckroe Beach—remember, you and Mr. Jeff and Miss Adelaide and ‘bout twenty-five yo’ friends from school—and I fixed fried chicken and biscuits and all. Remember, we built a fire on the sand and all? And Miss Adelaide was walkin’ up and down the beach, singing’. Dat sho was a happy time.” I watched her as she spoke, a melancholy, large-nosed brown woman, angular of face and with a stooped, angular body, gazing into space in distant reflection as she stroked absently at her chin. She had worked for us as cook and maid for seven or eight years. Her crankiness had become legendary. She almost never smiled, couldn’t crack a smile even when greeting guests—an uncorrectable trait that my mother had tried vainly to correct. Everyone had regarded Florence as “exceedingly competent” or “well trained” but hopelessly sullen. I knew better since I simply knew
her
better, and as a little kid I’d hung for interminable hours around the kitchen, where I learned that her sullenness was in truth a grim, grievous equanimity, the outcome of a daily struggle to keep her composure in the face of unending family catastrophes. Despite her glowering countenance, despite her pay (five dollars a week, plus meals and totin’ privileges, standard throughout the village), Florence was unfailingly loyal to our tiny, disintegrating family—patient with my father, who was becoming more and more unstrung as the time passed, and gently protective but strict with me, over whom she had thrown, so naturally that I had scarcely realized its presence, the cloak of surrogate motherhood. And she attended to my mother’s needs like some tireless and consecrated priestess. I think she had began to mourn her, in the dark privacy of her already ravaged heart, long before my father and I were really aware of what was happening. “And dat Christmastime two or three years ago,” she went on, patting my knee, “when Mr. Harry Bladen was drunk and dat French wife of his got so steamin’ mad she po’d a bottle of wine over his head. An’ Miss Adelaide she laughed so much she almost choked on the capon I cooked. Dat was a happy time. ‘Member that? And we thought you wasn’t goin’ to get no bicycle on account of the sto’ didn’t deliver it the day before. But the man from the sto’ carne on Christmas Day, and there that wheel was just shinin’, and you about so happy you just ready to blow away.”

I’m going to discharge that woman as soon as she comes, first thing tomorrow morning I can no longer stand that colored woman around

Adelaide, I’m telling you, you will do no such thing. She’s been with us for four years now and she’s hardworking and faithful Except for once or twice when she was ill she’s not missed a single day Even in that fantastic hurricane she was here, when the trolleys had stopped running!

I can’t have her working here anymore. I can’t put up with this absolutely hangdog manner! This Yessum and No’m spoken with such hostility, as if I had requested some incredibly arduous service. And when Louise Marabie, trying to be nice, trying not to offend, suggests nonetheless, as you heard her tonight, that there is a big difference between polite reserve and rudeness, then I feel it’s the last straw. She’s out as of tomorrow morning. O-u-L

Adelaide, let me tell you something. Let me be candid I think you ’ve come a long, long way in the years since we first knew each other. We’ve discussed this before, and you will recollect your own admission that you came to Virginia with a load of ugly prejudices about colored people. Such an irony, too, a Pennsylvanian, a college graduate
—
sophisticated, widely traveled, reader of William Faulkner,
bien èlevèe,
and all that
—
carrying around this baggage of truly bizarre notions about colored people, as you still prefer to call them, or Negroes, as I call them. Crudely, if I might jog your memory, you said they all smelled
—
like onions, or perhaps garlic, if recollection serves me right
—
and you also uttered the howler that in terms of physiognomy there was no way to tell one Negro from another. And I remember clearly when Paul was about five your telling him to say “colored woman, ” not “lady. ” Good gracious, the ways of the world are strange. Here I was, not the grandson, mind you, but the son of a slave owner, born in a county 45 percent Negro, and reared in an atmosphere so benighted as regards this one matter that I was a fully grown adult before I realized that despite formal manumission, these people had continued to dwell in a state of slavery, in many ways worse. I don’t mean to sound self-righteous but it was I who had to teach you, not you me, that Negroes had essential qualities of dignity and decency. I, a shit-kicking Carolina yokel who, when I first met you, suspected you of being a neo-abolitionist
—

Jefferson, stop, you are missing the point entirely
—
Wait a minute, Adelaide, and then you can proceed I fully concede that your attitudes have changed remarkably in recent years. You have become, if by my standards, not quite truly open-minded, then certainly tolerant, and your sense of fair play is exemplary when stacked up against that of some of the bigoted friends you play with, and of the other adherents of the dinosaur politics of Harry Byrd with his execrable poll tax and other felonies
—

And that is the point, Jefferson! It’s not her color, it’s her class! She’s a servant! She’s of the servant class, the class that served our family in Connellsville, some Irish, some German, some Hungarian, but servants! Mama and Daddy asked only that they be pleasant-mannered, and finally that’s all I’m asking of this sullen, evil-spirited Florence you’ve supported so long
—

That was a few years before, and my mother had, at last, come around to a frank affection for Florence, sullen or whatever, smile or no smile. In the alcove Florence and I sat silently together for a while, listening. We were alert to the motions upstairs, awaiting a murmur, a voice, even the creaking of a floorboard, but we heard nothing. And thus the silence, I knew, meant that my father and Miss Slocum had again taken up their vigil at my mother’s bedside, creating that virtually motionless tableau which—whenever I stole past the room, forbidden to go in—appeared to have existed immemorially, like some old painting or illustration I had seen (or thought I had seen) called “The Sickroom”: the recumbent form in the blue nightgown, unsheeted in the heat, only the bare, withered calves showing, and the bruised-looking skeletal feet; the shirt-sleeved back of my father bent forward in his chair, obscuring my mother’s face, his tense arms seeming to be suspended in the act of a frantic embrace; Miss Slocum gazing from the other side of the bed with a look of pensive dreaminess, unperturbed, the light glinting from the starched cap resting like a white tiara upon the crest of her permanent wave. Behind all, the massed flowers—gladioli, white and yellow roses, tulips, bunched arrangements in wicker baskets with wicker handles. And an electric fan on a stand sweeping a dread stench from the room: overripe blossoms and acrid medicine. Florence and I listened, turned to glance at each other, listened again, heard nothing but the katydids shrilling in the darkness. The night was fecund and sweet-smelling with clematis. “You know, Paul,” Florence said finally, “I heered tell of many folks got well from what yo’ mama got, worse off dan her. Yes, many folks. Dere was dis white lady in Suffolk who was jest as sick as yo' mama. I heered tell of her not long ago. She was a long, long time in bed and sufferin’ and takin’ mo’phine and all, and suddenly she got well. One night she was layin’ there in dis great pain and de peoples was givin’ her mo’phine an’ all, and she just began to speak and she rose up on her feet and walked. And she was all well. From den on she was well and jest as healthy as you an’ me. It was de spirit of God dat saved dat woman. It was de grace of Jesus Christ an’ his salvation.”