Lazaretto (7 page)

Sylvia thanked him politely but assured him that she could make her way unaided. His teeth were too small, she thought, his ears too large, his face too wide, his hairline already receding. She was picky when it came to men. Nevada tried to convince her that she feared love, and that she only feared love because she was unsure of herself. “For all your smarts, you cannot see it?” She'd challenge Sylvia. “If no one can suit you, then you never have to risk all that a person risks when they allow their feet to leave the ground.”

Carl took the crate from Sylvia anyhow and the sudden absence of the weight told her how heavy it had been. She didn't realize that her arms were bleeding from the rubbing of the splintered wood. She generally didn't leave the house with her arms exposed, but she'd left in a hurry, before Vergie could try to follow. Carl noticed the blood before she did. “Ah, what you do to those pretty arms?” he asked, as he put the crate on the ground and pulled a handkerchief from his back pants pocket and dabbed at her arms. His eyes were tender, brown like syrup. His touch was light as air. “If that crate wasn't necessary for toting your haul to wherever you headed, I would crush it with my bare hands as punishment for scraping your pretty arms.” He laughed and his laugh caught
in his throat and Sylvia realized that he was nervous. She'd not known that her presence could bring out nervousness in a man. The knowledge bolstered her, changed her, and she and Carl began keeping company.

It was a comfortable courtship, Carl was easy about Sylvia's educational pursuits, even encouraged them. He had a decent income, working as a pipefitter at the shipyard, so he won her parent's approval—at least her father's, as it was difficult to satisfy Maze, who was intent on Sylvia being linked with a man of the social class to which her mother aspired. But Carl had won Nevada over with his sincerity. And Vergie adored him since he was always happy to include her in his visits with Sylvia. Which pleased Sylvia greatly, because Vergie was one of the joys of her life.

JUST AS VERGIE
was Sylvia's joy, Linc and Bram were Meda's. Though a sun didn't set when Meda had not spent part of the day thinking about the baby she'd lost, the boys' presence in her life lifted her up in ways that even Ann's friendship did not. And every time she'd say their names—Bram and Linc—she'd think that she was honoring the president, the father she'd lost.

Mrs. Benin was not so taken by the boys. From the beginning she'd been reluctant about the arrangement of Meda bringing the boys into their home for weekends and holidays. But her husband had overruled her. Said that the infants had lost their fathers to the war, and since he himself had not donned a uniform or fired a gun or given his life on the Union's behalf, at least he could be charitable to the sons of men who had. She'd countered that he could just make a deposit of funds in the orphanage's account. Why must her home be tarnished by the presence of such ragamuffins? Her friends were beginning to whisper. He stood firm, suggested that she buy them the necessary clothes, school them in the manners that her friends might find acceptable.

Though resentful about the arrangement, Mrs. Benin did make available for the boys finely constructed clothing. And by the time they were four years old, she did try to introduce them to music, tried to teach them piano, at which she herself was quite skilled.

Bram showed a proclivity for the piano. He would sit next to Mrs. Benin for long stretches, fascinated by her ability to make
music, wanting to be able to make such sounds himself. She began to allow incremental affection for Bram; told him that he had the most beautiful hands, that his long, slender fingers were well-suited for the piano. Linc was also drawn to the music, but he had no patience for the painstaking instruction; found it impossible not to fidget when he sat on the bench next to Mrs. Benin. Plus, he didn't have Bram's hands, as Mrs. Benin explained to him repeatedly. His hands were short and stubby, she said, ill-suited for the keyboard. She'd shoo him away when he came near, tell him he was wasting her time. Linc would slide from the piano bench, and Bram and Linc would touch elbows then—their private gesture of greeting, saying hello or goodbye to one another, their way also of saying, without anyone else being privy, you are my brother and I love you like life itself.

After he was banned from the piano, Linc would find Meda; his preference was to be with Meda, anyhow. He would sit at the foot of her chair and scribble on scraps of paper she'd hand him and listen to her hum as she inked Mrs. Benin's notes. He'd run back and forth through the Benin bedroom as Meda arranged the clothes in their closets. He'd sit at the kitchen table as she prepared the afternoon snack. His favorite times were when she'd read aloud to him, whatever it was she happened to be reading, even something as mundane as a letter to Mrs. Benin inviting her to an event for which Meda was tasked with drafting a reply. They'd take seats on the back porch, and he'd lean his head on her arm, and it was as if he could feel her voice vibrating through her arm. It was the best feeling in the world to him, the sound of her voice even better than the sounds Bram made with the piano keys, which would filter through the house and were growing more and more accomplished.

Tom Benin stepped out onto the porch on one afternoon while they were out there and Linc instantly jumped up. “Sir,” he said.
Benin nodded in his direction, then stood there, waiting for Meda to look up. She did not. He cleared his throat, and Meda continued reading aloud, though she'd taken her volume down to a whisper, and Linc was confused. Meda had taught them that they had to give Tom Benin the highest respect, even greater than the respect they gave to his wife because it was Mr. Benin who allowed them time away from the orphanage to be with Meda. He thought that Meda must not be aware that Mr. Benin was standing there. So he leaned down and nudged her, “Meda,” he said in a loud whisper, and she looked up at him and smiled the softest of smiles.

“What is it, my dear Linc?” she said.

He made his eyes go big and moved them in the direction of Tom Benin, trying to tell her that the man of the house was there, that she was being disrespectful. She still didn't acknowledge Tom Benin. She pulled Linc to her instead and smooched his cheek and told him that he was a most handsome boy. Tom Benin left without a word. And Linc asked Meda why did she not give her hello to him.

“I have my reasons,” she said. “Mine alone—you are still obligated to mind your manners when he is about.”

On another afternoon, not long after, it happened again. Again Linc stood and said, “Sir,” as soon as Tom Benin appeared on the porch. Tom Benin nodded as Meda continued her reading, and then Tom Benin called her name. She looked up then. “Evening?” she said, making it a question rather than a salutation. He reached into his vest pocket. “My watch needs to be cleaned, will you see to it, please?”

She opened her hand and he placed the watch there, and Linc moved in to get a closer look at it, and said, “Ooh, what's that, bridges?”

Tom Benin picked the watch up. “Be careful,” he said, “it's irreplaceable. Let me show you.” He sat down on the chair that
faced Meda, and Linc stood in front of him and Tom Benin told him those were in fact bridges on the watch. “Go ahead, you can touch it,” he said. And then he explained to Linc how valuable the watch was, that it was one of the first of its kind to be made, that it had been shown at the exposition in Paris, though he'd actually owned his for several years before that, because the watchmaker was a family friend. Linc squeezed into the chair next to Tom Benin and asked how many bridges were there, and Tom Benin said, “Let's count,” and they counted the three bridges.

“He can count higher than that,” Meda said, without looking up from the paper she read. Then Tom Benin asked Linc to count for him.

Linc counted to twenty, then applauded himself the same way Meda would clap when he and Bram showed off what they could do. A smile broke on Tom Benin's face, and Linc nestled in closer to him on the chair and pulled on Tom Benin's hand to show him the hand game that Meda had taught him. Tom Benin laughed as Linc chattered away, and then Benin's laughter hung unfinished in the air. Mrs. Benin stood in the doorway. Said that she would like a word with him. He cleared his throat and stood and handed his watch to Linc and asked him if he would deliver it to Meda. As he walked from the porch, Linc gave the watch to Meda and she slipped it in the pocket of her frock. Linc sat next to her again as she resumed reading out loud.

The following weekend, as Bram sat on the piano bench, waiting for Mrs. Benin to come down to start with his lesson, Linc wandered into the room and Bram motioned him to the piano and said listen to this, and proceeded to play the piece he was learning, Bach's minuet in G Major. He told Linc to sit next to him and he would teach him, and then Mrs. Benin would see that Linc also had talent and would once again be willing to give him lessons. Linc tried to follow Bram's example but ended up hitting all the wrong keys, and
then he made a game of it, pretending to be a concert pianist, and Bram laughed, and then he froze because there was Mrs. Benin.

“Get up from there this instant,” she said, and both boys scrambled to get up. “Not you, Bram, you remain seated,” she said as she grabbed the pointing stick from the piano and told Linc to spread out his hands. When he did, she struck his hands with the stick, over and over, until Bram started to cry on Linc's behalf. She hit his hands and called him names—urchin, undisciplined, uncultured, with his rat teeth and eyes so dark and sneaky they looked to have been visited by Satan. Said he had the ugliest hands she'd ever seen, hands that had been spawned by an ape. She seemed to lose all control as she berated him and smacked at his hands till his knuckles began to bleed and Bram, hysterical now, ran to find Meda.

Meda rushed into the room and then stopped at the threshold as she saw the bloody stick going up and down through the air, and Linc standing there, stoic, streaming tears but otherwise not making a sound. “Lord Father God,” Meda said under her breath, though her faith had always been wobbly at best. Maybe there was a God, maybe not, was her stance on religion, even as she'd call on the Lord just in case. But she got some confirmation as to his existence when she grabbed for the marble bust of Caesar—or maybe it was Marcus Aurelius, she'd get the two confused—and before she could lift it in her hands, she felt something wide and deep and powerful surround her and pin her arms to her sides, preventing her from picking up the bust and ramming it into Mrs. Benin's head equal to the number of times she'd hard-landed that wooden stick against Linc's hands. Her voice at least still worked, and she screamed, “You evil, wretched cow! Hit him again and I will kill you.” At least that's what she'd tried to put forth. But it was as if the same force that had paralyzed her arms snatched at her words as they were passing from her lips, re-forming them. “I need to
retrieve Mr. Benin's riding boots that have been resoled. I would like for Lincoln to accompany me” was the reconfigured version of her words.

She pulled Linc into the kitchen with her. She hugged him and kissed his hands and held herself back from crying. She cleaned away the blood as gently as she could. She coated his battered fingers with a thick layer of honey and overspread that with lard. She loosely wrapped his hands in cotton and they left the house and took a streetcar into town.

Linc considered his battererd hands a small price to pay for a streetcar ride with Meda, his only regret being that Bram wasn't with them, too. She asked him every other minute how his hands were. “Better,” he said, though all of his fingers still throbbed with a burning sensation. And they were better as he felt the honey oozing into the rawness, setting up a barrier. Plus the motion of the trolley, and the sound of the horses' clop-clops was a comfort as he allowed his head to fall against her arm. The nubby wool of her shawl was scratchy against his cheek, but he could feel a pulsing through the shawl that he thought was her heart beating, so he nestled his head closer in and tried to get his heart to beat in time with hers.

They walked along Market Street, busy with shoppers and peddlers alike, and Meda stopped at a stall and bought a ladle of pepper pot soup that she blew on to cool and then offered to Linc. The flavor exploded in Linc's head, and he asked if next time he could share with Bram. Meda said, “Surely, when all is said and done, you and Bram have only each other to lean on.” Linc nodded, though the memory of her heart beating against the side of his face was too recent for him not to consider always having her to lean on, too.

They headed south and ended up at Fitzwater Street where the people were all dark like Meda was dark, and though Linc thought them mostly pleasant-looking, none were as pretty to him
as Meda, with the way that her face opened up when she smiled, the way her big droopy eyes crinkled at the corners, the way her cheekbones fell away leaving soft brown blossoms; and even when she wasn't smiling, even when he'd catch her staring off into space with a sadness so heavy hanging in her eyes that he'd want to reach up and pluck it away, even then was she the prettiest to him.

Meda said “How-do” to the people as they moved up the street, and Linc was entranced by a woman sitting on her steps making a loud sound that was a mix of a ship's steam whistle and a wolf's howl. The sound matched her appearance: her hair was uncovered, wild and spikey; her feet were bare; her shoulders moved up and down almost convulsively. It was Miss Ma, Nevada's grandmother.

“What's wrong with her?” Linc asked.

“Near as anyone can tell, not a speck of anything,” Meda said. “Miss Ma just breaks out into laughter for no good cause. How are your hands feeling?”

“She is
laughing
?” Linc asked.

“Yes, and only she knows what about. How are your hands?”

“Better,” he said. The surprising sight of Miss Ma had trumped the throbbing in his fingers, and he kept turning to look back at her, mesmerized; mesmerized, too, by the fact that everyone they'd passed on this street seemed to know Meda, though they all called her Sister, and Linc asked her why.

“That is just how I am known here. My brother has always called me Sister and I suppose the name just attached itself to me. Linc had never thought of Meda's existence outside of Benin's, or the orphanage, where she still came to help out on Fridays, before she packed them up to spend weekends with her.

They stopped in front of a house where the door was cracked and the air jumped with the fast talk and laughter of men with deep voices. They stepped into that raucous setting, which was her
brother's living room, though converted into a gambling parlor on a Saturday afternoon where the card table was the centerpiece and food and spirits and the sounds of a banjo and a harmonica spilled out from the dining room.

Meda walked Linc to the table crowded with ferocious-looking men. “Tell me, Buddy, have you ever seen a more beautiful pair of hands,” she asked, her voice finding an interstice between the high and low notes of the harmonica and the booming voices that laughed and cursed.

The one she called Buddy was the color of the hens the cook roasted on Sundays, part red, part brown, part black where the seasoning clumped and burned. One of his eyes hung lower than the other and only opened halfway; the other was a full circle that seemed amused by whatever it saw. He fixed his good eye on Linc, then raised a finger to halt the play of cards. “Commere, liddle white boy, lemme see what you got.” Buddy's hands were thick and calloused and surprisingly tender as he unwrapped the rag from around Linc's hands. He let go a long whistle when he saw Linc's scarred, swollen knuckles. “Whose ass I need to kick for fucking up the liddle white boy?”

Meda slapped him in the back. “Just answer me, please, Buddy. Tell him how beautiful are his hands.”