Lazaretto (18 page)

Linc tapped on the door, to no response. He reasoned that they could scarcely hear him, so he turned the bulbous glass knob to let himself in, telling himself he'd apologize for entering their party uninvited.

Aromas crowded the foyer, sweet and heavy smells, the mu
sic seeming to ride on top of the smells like a bent finger saying “Come 'ere,” motioning him toward a set of pocket doors. He slid the doors apart. Before he saw anything else: before he saw the twenty-five or so people—the women dressed up in linen and cotton and lace, mostly in high heels, the men in vested suits; before he saw the sideboard groaning under the weight of the roasted ducks and accompanying bowls heaped with assorted greens, carrots, beets, and corn; before he saw the framed pencil etching of Lincoln centered over the brocaded fainting couch; or the roses that seemed to be everywhere, he saw a woman standing behind a long table, pouring a strawberry-colored juice from a pot into a carved glass punch bowl. Her race was ambiguous, her face caught in the light reflecting from the glass bowl. As she moved out of the light, she threw her head back and said “Oh drats” over a splash of juice that fell on the tablecloth, his awareness grew that not only was she black, but that she was the same one who'd enraged the men on the boat by flicking her hand at them. He started to turn around and leave lest she recognize him, then reminded himself again that that was unlikely, he'd not stood and raised a bottle with the other two. Plus, he didn't want to leave; he was drawn to her, her presence provoking a powerful stirring right now. He was ashamed of himself because of it. Not ashamed because he was a white man going weak-kneed over a black woman, but ashamed because he thought his desire somehow devalued her.

He didn't mean to devalue her. He'd spent large chunks of his childhood with Meda after all, and Buddy and his friends. He reminded himself of that now. Convinced himself that since black people had been so familiar to him, that he was surely without prejudice, and that the surge he felt as this woman moved closer to him had nothing to do with the realization that she was black—her full lips the confirmation. But he couldn't deny the
surge, the force of it, as it lumbered more than pulsed, rendering him wooden.

“You got clay in your ears? I asked you if you are lost.” She was right up on him now, practically shouting in his face.

Linc stared down at his feet. Shyness had never been among his repertoire of traits, especially where women were concerned. But with her standing in so closely, suddenly he couldn't get his voice to work.

“A mess,” he stammered out finally.

“I would agree. You are quite the mess. What happened? A frog chase you into the creek?”

He felt mocked, aware suddenly of how he must look, contrasted with the high-buffed shoes and crisp clothes of the people in here. He backed up so that the shadow of the column near where he stood would hide him some. She followed him into the shadow. He took her presence in. She was tall and slender, dark hair, dark eyes—large eyes with a downward slant, eyes that should belong to a timid girl. Her stare compensated; it was a fiery stare. “Or if not a frog chasing you,” she went on, “maybe a big old owl lifted you up and dropped you in the manure pile.”

“I tracked dirt,” he said. “I apologize.”

“You ought to apologize,” she said. “And you ought to be glad my cousin is not about. Sylvia is the nurse here, she's very serious about cleanliness and does not tolerate mud-trackers.”

“If I offer to clean it up, will you save me from her?” he asked, his confidence seesawing back to normal as the thumping from the dance floor and the music wrapped around him.

“Save
you
?” she blurted. “My friends and I needed saving from your kind while we were on the river. Now here you are requesting that I save
you
?”

“What happened to you and your friends?” He feigned ignorance.

“We were shot at!”

“Shot at? By whom? For what cause?”

“By your kind, and for no cause, no provocation.” She looked away then. Her profile was stunning, the line of her jaw, the way her mouth protruded. He felt himself going to mush. He tried to convince himself that his reaction to her was typical, that this was the pull he always felt toward a woman when spurred on by his baser instincts. But he could not convince himself, had to concede that he had never been so affected by a woman in this way, such that it involved his entire self. Told himself now that this was his mind playing tricks, a defense to distract him from the fire in his belly over his current situation, over the fate of his brother. If that was the case, it was working: he was distracted.

Glaring at him now, she repeated, “Yes, your kind.”

“Not
my
kind, I assure you,” he said and shook his head from side to side emphatically. “In fact, had I been in the vicinity, I would have come to your rescue. I swear it on my dead mother's smile—I would have, or I would have died trying,” he said, remembering as he said it how hard he had fought those louts on the boat.

“Better if you had saved my friend from getting shot.” Her eyes appeared no longer focused on him as she stared straight ahead and talked into the air.

“What is your friend's name?”

“Carl.”

“And yours?”

“Vergilina.”

“Vergilina,” he repeated in a whisper, as if he'd been handed a prize. “How is Carl faring, Miss Vergilina?” He touched her arm; it was a forward move he knew, but he did so to calm himself as much as to console her. The starched feel of her blouse was warm against his fingers.

She shook her arm away from where his hand touched. She was glaring at him again. “Who are you, besides?” she asked, exasperation running through her voice. “And what is it you want? You never said.”

He just stood there, mute, thinking about what he wanted. He wanted to be at a card table right now, enjoying the comforting sound of cards being shuffled; wanted to feel the cards against his fingers as he arranged the cards in a fan; he wanted Meda to be alive; he wanted the afternoon back so that he could follow Bram outside of the tavern and be right there with him when he fell ill. He wanted to discard the threat looming over him like a beast's shadow that he might be recognized. What else did he want? He tried not to look at Vergie's lips, how full they were as he thought of all the things he wanted right now.

“You surely do not work on the Lazaretto”—Vergie filled the silence left by his non-response—“because the white workers were given leave for the weekend, allowing us to enjoy ourselves unhampered.”

“Unhampered?” Linc almost shouted to be heard over the music.

“Yes, unhampered. It means we get to enjoy the festivities and be who we are without having to look over our shoulders to determine how our actions are affecting your kind. You never heard that word?”

“I know the word. And surely you would have no need of looking over your shoulder at
me
. You could enjoy yourself to your heart's content and I would likely get enjoyment merely watching you have a good time.”

“You are not a normal white man, then.” She looked away again as if she were trying not to cry.

“Neither are the ones who shot at your boat and hurt Carl.”

“They are in fact closer to the normal that I know.”

“I wish you could know me, then,” he said. “My name is Lin
coln, Miss Vergilina, and, well, I wish you could know me, because if you did, well, you would know with every certainty that I am in fact your kind, every bit your kind.” He surprised himself that he'd said that; he hadn't intended to say that.

Vergilina's mouth dropped. “Are you telling me that you are a colored man?” she asked.

He looked around this grand room that smelled of bourbon and sage from the barbecued pork that had just been put out on the sideboard. He stopped and swallowed and in an instant flashed back to that night when he'd just left the tables at a house on an alley of a street on the rough edge of Manhattan's Tenderloin district; he was pushed against the wall by more black men than he could count, a knife held to his throat by one of the men intent on avenging the death of his little brother at the hands of a white man. Linc knew that the fact that he'd had nothing to do with the crime would mean nothing to them—he was white and would do as a fill-in for whoever had murdered the man's brother. So Linc had deepened his voice to save his life and swore that he was every bit as colored as each one of them, had a colored mother, he lied, who'd encouraged him to pass for white that he might make a better life. “I wern't able to try and pass for no white man. Man know his dern soul, den he know his soul. I hail from over on Fitzwater Street in Philadelphia,” he said, calling out the block where Buddy lived. “Would a white man be living 'mongst niggers if he was truly white?” He used the inflections in his voice that were so familiar to him from having spent time with Buddy. As his good luck would have it, one of the men knew Philadelphia, knew Fitzwater Street. They'd let him go, even dusting the cement flakes from his back.

He looked at Vergie now, even as he thought about his brother, blond-haired, pale-complexioned Bram. Bram had looked deathly sitting across from him at the tavern, his skin the color of a boiled
chicken, his eyes yellow like a cat's eyes, his shirt bleeding sweat. Linc's entire life, he could always sense Bram's nearness. Now he could not. The feel of Bram's absence was like a bludgeoning. He exchanged it now for the feel of Vergie's nearness; the look on Vergie's face, her head tilted slightly, her fleshy mouth pulled to one side in a smirk, her stormy eyes fixed on him, questioning, waiting for his response.

“Yes,” he said. And when he said it he felt a lug drop in his stomach as if he'd just betrayed Bram, betrayed the mother who'd died birthing him, the father killed fighting for the Union, even as the words slid out with such ease. “I am telling you exactly that I am a colored man.”

He felt dizzy then, as if the earth no longer expressed its gravitational pull and was about to spin away, unhinged. He felt the blood draining from his face, so he coughed into his hand in hope of bringing color back to his face, as the last thing he needed was to appear whiter than he was.

Before he could say more, there was the thump of the front door opening and closing. And now Vergilina was squealing and running and calling out Sylvia's name. “You took so long, Sylvia, I was dying waiting for you to get here. How is Carl?” There was an onslaught then as everyone in the parlor moved at once to the foyer where Sylvia was, even the banjo player and the one clapping the tambourine, only the one blowing the harmonica remained. Linc pushed himself harder against the column, trying to blend in with the vanilla-colored wood as the notes coming from the harmonica fell at his feet and sounded like a grown man crying. Or moaning, about to cry.

SYLVIA WOKE WITH
a jolt. The first light of day was pushing through the parlor, and a foul odor had overpowered the air in here. She sat straight up and took in a deep breath, and the odor assaulted her stomach like a fist. Carl, she thought first of Carl. His pain had been considerable when she'd last checked on him, just a couple of hours ago. She'd given him more morphine and left him in the chasm between sleep and delusion, and then returned here and nodded off on the couch, intending to help Nevada and Bay and Vergie and whoever else was in the kitchen, chattering away as they cleaned up after the party; told herself she just needed to sit still, rest her eyes, for the briefest period of time. The last thing she remembered, her moccasins were slid from her feet, her legs pulled up onto the couch, a pillow eased under head, a light sheet draped over her, and her forehead gently kissed. She'd fallen into a soft slumber and dreamed that she and Carl were dancing in the river, and then she was trying to remember why she'd ever quit such a man who could move so in the water. Then a gray octopus tangled her up and Carl disappeared under the water and the octopus began defecating all over her, and though the smell was nauseating, she clung to the octopus because the feel of his droppings was like silk. She threw the dream off with the sheet as she got up from the couch, but the odor hadn't left with the dream. She thought then that the smell was inside her head, a warning to her of Carl's infected leg. He
would lose the leg, she was sure. She sighed heavily and slipped her feet into her moccasins and started for the stairs. She'd have to arrange transport for Carl back to Philadelphia as soon as possible. They were too short-staffed here to even consider a surgery as major as amputating a leg. No doctor really to speak of, and since Ledoff had given most of the staff leave, there was really just her, with Spence to assist, and though Spence would be an apt assistant, this was his wedding day, after all; and, besides, she wasn't about to attempt it, she told herself, and that settled it.

She tiptoed into her bedroom, where Vergie was fast asleep. She went to her chest of drawers and pulled out a loose cotton dress. The aroma of pine greeted her, a relief from that other smell, and the dress that she changed into now smelled of the mint oil that Bay would drizzle in the basin where they washed their clothes. It both invigorated and calmed her.

She was halfway out of the room when Vergie stirred and was immediately fully awake, grinning in that way that showed all of her gums.

“Lookout, sunshine, your competition has arrived, because Vergilina is up,” Sylvia said, as she came all the way back into the room and laughed in spite of herself.

“Sylvia, you didn't come to bed. I slept small so you'd have room.”

“You do not know the meaning of sleeping small. There is still a spot on my back from two years ago when we shared sleeping space at Nevada's people's house in Virginia.”

“Awl,” Vergie said, feigning remorse, then turned remorseful for real as she asked about Carl.

“Headed over there now to make sure he's comfortable. He was comfortable when I left him, and Spence is with him now.”

Vergie sat on the side of the bed with her hands in her lap. She studied her fingers, fighting tears, Sylvia could tell. “Come hook
the back of my dress and redo this bun in my hair and tell me about the party,” Sylvia said. “Did you behave at the party or were you full of your usual sass?”

“I was my typically well-behaved self,” Vergie said as she sniffed and jumped up and ran to Sylvia and hugged her. “Please tell me that he will live.”

“Only the Good Lord can make and keep such a promise. But as far as my trained eye can see, he does not appear to be dying at this moment. I'm going to arrange for him to be transported back to Philadelphia as soon as possible. Now hook my dress in the back, and tell me who all is here who I may or likely do not know, and describe who made a fool of themselves doing the cakewalk.”

Vergie fastened the dress and Sylvia sat at the vanity as Vergie removed the pins holding Sylvia's bun in place. “Well, of course you know Miss Ma is here—”

“Lord, yes, thought I heard her laughing when I was all the way over at the hospital.”

“And Skell—”

“He is officiating the wedding, Nevada says—”

“And that frightful Lena—”

“Well, she is the bride's sister, so I guess she thinks that gives her special license to be more intolerable than usual—”

“And there was a strange man who wandered into the parlor last night, tracking up the place with mud.”

“Stranger?” Sylvia thought immediately of her encounter at the creek. “Tall? Dark-haired white man? Proclaimed himself named for President Lincoln.”

“Sounds as you describe him,” Vergie said as she brushed Sylvia's hair and tried to ignore her own quickening pulse. “You two crossed paths?”

“At the creek,” Sylvia said, as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the feel of the brush against her hair. “Supposed to have been
looking for his brother sent here from the hospital. Though he's either mistaken or loony, the hospital always alerts us. I directed him back to the other side of the creek. How did he end up here? Must have been before he met up with me near the barges. I took pity on him and allowed him to take sleeping space in the curing shack.”

“He remains here?” Vergie asked, trying to slow her breathing down.

“Mnhm.” Sylvia bent her head so Vergie could brush her edges. She thought she might drift off to sleep, the brushstrokes were so relaxing.

“Well, are you aware that he's black?” Vergie asked on a quick intake of air, giving her voice a breathy sound.

“We are not talking about the same man then,” Sylvia said as she opened her eyes and picked up Vergie's reflection in the mirror. “This one is definitely white, tall, dark-haired.”

“We are talking about one and the same. Lincoln. Did you just say he was named for the president?”

“And he claimed to be black?”

“He did indeed.”

“Explicitly?”

“Yes, and at first I doubted the claim but I spoke of it to Nevada and she confirmed it.”

“Does Nevada know him?”

“No, but she said that if the tips of his ears are black, then he is surely colored, and I do recall that they were—”

“What! Tips of his ears are black? Only Nevada could come up with such foolishness.”

“Well, she insists that she's known many a light-skinned colored pass themselves off as white, but she's never ever seen it happen the other way around. Which is a fact. Have you, Sylvia? Have you ever known of a white man who claims to be colored?”

“Just because I have no knowledge of it happening does not mean that it has not happened.”

“But what would a white person gain by doing such a thing?

“Depends on what they might be after—”

“Well, Nevada said that I should be the last somebody questioning a person's race. To which I had to clamp my lips shut because she is justified in saying it.”

“And all of this about the man's race, this matters to you why, Vergilina?” Sylvia asked. She could see even in the mirror the sudden change in the color of Vergie's cheeks, her cheeks tinted the shade of a peach at full ripeness that hangs lower on the branch, begging to be picked. “How well do you know this Lincoln, after all?”

“I do not know a thing about him and I do not care a thing about him.”

“Who said a word about caring for him? Now you just went ahead and introduced that prospect. Do you care about him?”

“Sylvia! I only saw him for the first time last night, how much could I know him? And besides, your scalp is dry, where do keep your pomade?”

Sylvia pointed to the vanity drawer and Vergie retrieved the pomade and rubbed it into Sylvia's hair and commenced to give her a vigorous scalp massage. She started at the nape of her neck and worked her fingers all the way to her forehead. Sylvia closed her eyes, enjoying it, Vergie could tell, as she felt the tension in Sylvia's scalp ease under the press of her fingers. Poor Sylvia, Vergie thought. How difficult the whole situation with Carl must be for her. She wondered if Sylvia blamed her the way that Lena and probably most of the people on the boat blamed her, the way she blamed herself. She felt herself about to cry again so she tried to change her line of thought since she considered it unconscionable to put Sylvia in the position of having to console her right now.
She dragged her thumbs up and down the center of Sylvia's scalp and then back and forth from ear to ear as Sylvia let go a whispered
ahhh
.

She swallowed the urge to cry and let herself think of Linc instead, and she was seeing him all over again, how sweaty and disheveled he was, and how sincere. She could tell that he was taken with her and she rushed to clarify her race. She was accustomed to white men assuming that she was white and doling out attention that they never would if they'd known that she was black. Accustomed also to the transformation in their demeanor when she'd let them know her true self. Their faces would suddenly redden, they'd cough, squint, their voices suddenly stuck in their throats, their heads drawn way in; then came the full body draw-back, the accusatory stance, the
you, you said
with a wagging finger as if she had committed a heinous crime. One even spit, and Vergie reflexively hauled off and slapped him, knocking a gold-capped tooth from his mouth; to her credit she'd had the presence of mind to run, about as fast as she'd hit him hard. As disparaging as the reaction to her race sometimes was, she was comfortable with it because she expected it. Her feelings never had to flow deeper than the top of her chest where all the loathing and disgust sat at the ready to be summoned. Linc's reaction had been the opposite. He'd seemed to lean in even closer, and his manner was so respectful, so honest when he'd said he would have fought to defend their boat. It was so unsettling. She didn't even know where to begin to piece things together, the opening in her chest for starters that managed to push through the top layer of loathing and disgust revealing a complex of unfamiliar sensations that both titillated and frightened her. And all that while she thought him white. What now that he claimed to be a black man? That should simplify things, she thought. Though it did not. It only made matters more complicated still.

Sylvia snored lightly as Vergie finished massaging her scalp and then twisted her hair in a bun. Vergie whispered her name. “All done,” she said. “You look as pretty as ever.” She smiled at Sylvia in the mirror and held herself back from asking where the curing shack was.