Everybody Loves Somebody (13 page)

“You say she’s abiding at one of those kingdoms?” Mr. Dosan asked the waitress, his voice inexplicably calm in the face of
such a terrifying revelation.

“One Hundred Twenty-sixth Street, last I hear. Calls herself Miss Love Dove. Miss Love Dove!” With that Mr. Dosan and the
waitress both began to laugh, or at least he chuckled scornfully while the waitress hooted. The girl looked on, dumb as a
fish in a bowl staring out at the world, colors and shapes beyond the glass making no sense, no sense at all. Her mama was
an angel and these two grown folks thought it all right to laugh. If she had been a different sort she would have slapped
Mr. Dosan, plunged a fork into the waitress’s thigh, and run out of the lunchroom. Instead, she concentrated on keeping her
tears from streaming down her face, succeeded for about ten seconds, and then gave up and let the tears do just as they pleased.
Most everyone in the restaurant turned to see what the fuss was about, but Mr. Dosan just leaned over the table and covered
her hands with both of his, the first time he’d ever touched her, while the waitress smoothed her hair, the two of them treating
the girl like a baby who deserved to be indulged.

Once the waitress had disappeared into the kitchen again, the other customers had turned back to their food, and the girl’s
noisy sorrow had quieted down, Mr. Dosan twisted his lips as though spitting out a bitter taste and said, “So your own materfamilias
has seen the light!”

“She an angel?” the girl whispered, keeping her voice low because she didn’t want to know the answer.

“She’s a fool.”

“She ain’t!”

“She believes that crimp is God, Sheebie!” he said, suddenly so formidable that the girl felt afraid of him. She withdrew
her hands and sank back against the cloth cushion of the booth, trying to disappear inside it. “He has gathered all the misfits
of the world together to worship him,” Mr. Dosan said, scorn making him spit out the words.

“Mama ain’t no” the girl began, but the waitress, who’d come back to the table with their coffee and ice cream, interrupted:
“Word is, you eat much as you want for fifteen cents at one of those kingdoms, chicken and brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes”

“I’ve seen that man myself, driving around in his shiny Cadillac,” Mr. Dosan countered.

“All that food for fifteen cents. Ribs and apple pie and pudding...”

“Wearing fancy suits...”

The waitress slid the sundae in front of the girl, who had never in her life had quite enough to eat. She began scooping up
chopped nuts and whipped cream, scraped the warm chocolate syrup out from the sides of the glass bowl. After letting a spoonful
of ice cream melt on her tongue she decided she didn’t like ice cream anymore because it made her cold inside, and she would
rather be anything but cold. She wondered if all those feasts at the kingdom kept her mama warm. She pictured her mama wearing
angel wings made out of tissue and wire, her mama plump as Santa Claus, her mama standing in some heavenly choir while the
man she thought was God stood behind the pulpit the way Preacher Vernon did every Sunday at the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

The girl said she needed to get home. Mr. Dosan stayed right beside her as she headed up Seventh Avenue. Later she would remember
an unusual expression on his face, a puckered look, as though a drawstring had been pulled inside his head. “Where is the
refuge for our children?” he demanded. “Nowhere in this world! Abandoned by those who bred you...” He fell silent for a long
minute, and then, with the suddenness of a radio switched on, he launched into his personal account of the “woes of mankind,”
including causes, consequences, and remedies, the words spilling from his mouth like water over the sides of a cup.

At first the girl was still so involved in imagining her mother as a false angel that she didn’t pay much attention to him,
and when she did try to listen, his speech seemed as obscure as an argument held between two people in a foreign language.
He left out the usual pauses so the sentences blended together and spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. He might
as well have been talking only to himself. Now the teacher who had introduced the girl to written language was just a hunched,
drooling old man dressed in baggy trousers without suspenders, a string tie, and a cheap flannel jacket, spouting wild talk
as he walked along, throwing out words like
advancement,
disorder,
anarchy,
and
fidelity,
obviously expecting the child not only to comprehend but to agree with him.

People stared at both of them—she felt the weight of their eyes, their judgment, and, even worse, their pity. They would assume
that this foolish old man was her daddy.

He ain’t!
she wanted to shout.
I don’t have nothing to do with him!
As they passed a bakery window she noticed a stocky woman standing behind an empty bread shelf, her face partially hidden
by the lettering on the glass, though enough of the woman was visible for the girl to know what she was thinking: the girl
had herself to blame. But it wasn’t her fault that Mr. Dosan had decided to supervise her education. She would have gone on
minding her own business and never bothered with book-learning. What use were books if this was their effect? Going on about
something he called individuation, circling around his vague ideas of social improvement and the importance of educating the
young. Mr. Dosan thought himself a genius equipped with enough knowledge to save the world, except that the liars and drunkards
kept getting in his way. Liars and drunkards were the bane of mankind. Liars and drunkards had failed in their duty to society.
Liars and drunkards—

“I got to go,” the girl announced, and with that she raced up Seventh Avenue without looking back, turned the corner onto
135th Street, leaped over flattened cardboard boxes soggy from the rain, ran as though she were being pursued all the way
home.

During the days that followed she joined her granny on the street. She didn’t want to see Mr. Dosan again. No, that wasn’t
it. She didn’t want Mr. Dosan to see her, for she sensed that he had expectations and had chosen her to fulfill them. He’d
been training her like a dog to perform extraordinary tricks, and she’d been trying to please him. Probably wanted to marry
her as soon as she turned thirteen. Well, she wasn’t having any more to do with him, she knew that much!

Granny kept asking her, wouldn’t she like to spend the afternoon at the library, and the girl kept declining, indicating that
she wanted nothing better than to sit on the curb beside the cart and watch people going about their business. She hadn’t
told her granny about Mr. Dosan, though now she wished she had, since Granny might have been able to explain why some old
folks accepted the dispensations of God and some flew into a rage over the littlest something. Why hadn’t Mr. Dosan come straight
out at the beginning and told her what he hoped to accomplish? And what did he really know about drunks? Her own mama was
never kinder, never more fun than when she’d been boozing, the girl could have testified. Take a tired, hungry woman, fill
her up with cheap gin, and you’ll put her in a laughing mood. Sure, the girl could tell Mr. Dosan a thing or two about juniper
perfume. Who did he think he was, stealing his ideas from books? Who was he? It occurred to her that she knew next to nothing
about the man. Where did he live? Where did he work? Did he work at all, or did he live on handouts?

Why did it matter anyway? She shrugged off her curiosity and pretended that her afternoons at the library belonged to some
hazy dream. She was finished with all that. But the one remnant of the dream she couldn’t ignore was the bit of information
about her mama, who had turned into an angel and was living at “the kingdom,” whatever that was, on 126th Street.

No surprise, then, that on a drizzly Saturday when Granny didn’t feel well enough to take the cart out, the girl found herself
heading toward her mama’s new home. Lenox had the spent, hungover look of a man who’d been carousing all night and didn’t
care where he lay down to sleep. The sky had been painted gray, and each bus or motorcar that passed ripped a thin layer of
skin off the avenue with its wet tires. As she walked, she let her hand bump along the iron bars protecting store windows.
One summer night a few years back, all these windows on Lenox had been shattered when Harlem went wild, busting and burning,
having a fine old time of it, or such was the girl’s notion while she’d lain in her bed listening to the distant sounds of
shattering glass and sirens. Her mother hadn’t come home at all that night, but the girl never worried, for she knew that
if there was fun to be had, Mama would be there. Granny made the mistake of sitting up until morning waiting for the riot
to end and Mama to return, wearing herself out so that when Mama did finally saunter in, Granny was too tired to whip her.

That memory of the riot stirred a more recent memory. The girl recalled how her mama had whispered something to Granny just
before heading off to become an angel. What had she said? She hadn’t seemed angry. Of course, Mama only got dopey, never angry.
What had she whispered to the old woman? Good-bye? Why hadn’t she said good-bye to her daughter? It wasn’t fair, the way grown
folks kept their secrets. And it wasn’t right of Mama to leave home without telling her daughter what she planned to do with
her life.

So many questions the girl had, and the variety of answers didn’t begin to console. Neither did the possibility that soon
she’d find out what she wanted to know. It might turn out that she would have been better off never seeing the kingdom with
its marble ramparts and towers, or so she pictured it, realizing even then that the actual kingdom would turn out to be unlike
anything she might imagine, much grander, she assumed, perhaps with jewels embedded in the walls and huge stone lions guarding
the doors.

It took her more than an hour to find her sparkling castle. She’d walked up and down 126th Street between St. Nicholas and
Third Avenue three times without seeing what turned out to be just a sooty brick building that looked like an old bathhouse
and identified itself with a hand-painted sign hanging crookedly on the door: welcome to the kingdom. She’d expected to be
surprised, but not disappointed. The Kingdom. Why would her mother give up all that she had—a grandmother, a daughter, a paying
job—for this? The girl stood in front of the building pondering the sign, working with some effort toward a new comprehension:
it didn’t matter what words meant, since you could attach any word to anything and make it stick. You could call a man God
and an old bathhouse a kingdom. You could call yourself by any name you pleased. You could walk right out of one life and
into another.

The light, silvery drizzle turned to a heavier rain, but the girl kept standing there, hatless, almost enjoying the soaking,
imagining that the rain would wash away the words on the sign, leaving it blank, leaving everything blank, nameless, without
memory or guilt, making it possible for a person to snap her fingers and change into an angel. The girl snapped her fingers
just to see what would happen, but they were too damp, too slippery to make a sound, and she remained what she’d been since
her mama had gone away:
Queen Sheebie, the only kin Granny got to live for anymore,
reminding the girl that the old woman would probably be wanting something right about then, a bowl of soup or some tea, and
with no one to wait on her she’d be steaming like the kettle should have been but wasn’t.

She would have left then if a well-bred white girl hadn’t accidentally snagged her sweater with the edge of an umbrella as
she strutted by, pretending to be the model of perfection, not even apologizing as she unhooked the metal spoke from the loop
of yarn. She scooted up the stairs of the brownstone in her dainty high-heeled shoes and entered the kingdom, closing the
door behind her with a smack. The girl might have snuck away then if the congregation hadn’t started to arrive, first individually,
a few in pairs, then in droves, hundreds even, some flocking down the street and others emerging from adjacent brownstones,
the commotion as abrupt and yet as orderly as if the curtain had been raised on a dance-hall stage. Still, the girl would
have remained outside the kingdom while the people disappeared inside if an elderly woman hadn’t taken her by the hand and
said sweetly, “Come in out of the rain, child.” Mesmerized by this sudden kindness, she let the woman lead her up the steps
and into the building that grew in magnificence as soon as the girl entered, not because the exterior hid an elaborately decorated
interior, which it didn’t, but because the front hall transformed ordinary people into worshippers, drawing from them exclamations
of “Peace, Sister,” “And to you, Brother,” warm embraces, and outbreaks of song. “He has the world in a jug,” a woman caroled.
“And the stopper in His hand,” the crowd echoed, merging into a line and filing through a narrow doorway to the tables.

How delicious the kingdom smelled—of wet clothes and clean bodies and fresh-baked cake, such a comforting stew of fragrances
that the girl wasn’t afraid, though the old woman who had invited her inside had disappeared in the crowd and no one else
paid any mind to her, not even the man passing the collection hat. He looked straight over her head as she entered the dining
hall, where the feast laid out was even more elaborate than the waitress had described. Besides plates of fricasseed chicken
and spareribs and brussels sprouts there were string beans, asparagus tips, sausage, fruit salad, and a total of eight chocolate
cakes set like top hats on the ends of each table. The girl seated herself right in front of a cake, reached up to swipe a
finger through the rich frosting, then saw the girl with the umbrella sitting patiently a few seats down, so she tucked her
hands in her lap, folded them around the hunger she was feeling, while she waited for the signal to dig in.

The din faded, and after a long minute of expectant silence, she felt the draft of wafting clothes. She turned in her seat
to see the procession of young women—ten of them, no, twenty, more than twenty—floating down the aisle toward the head table.
They wore identical white berets and white dresses decorated with ribbons and cloth buttons, and their smiles were so similar
their faces looked like cardboard masks, angel masks, the girl thought, remembering why she’d come here just as recognition
took hold.