Lazaretto (9 page)

The door was cracked and she could hear men's booming voices, and she thought,
I do not think I am going in there.
She decided to knock on the door and just hand the cake to whomever answered and tell them it was for Miss Ma's granddaughter and quickly leave. But then she thought she heard a child scream; it was a terrible scream, so she did go in, she pushed the door all the way, and walked in—and gasped at the scene playing out.

Linc had disobeyed Meda's instructions to remain in the dining room and sit under the sketch of Abraham Lincoln. Once Meda was out of sight, Buddy winked at Linc, and Linc ran to stand beside him as he shuffled the cards. Buddy had Linc point to which card he should play next, and the man they all called Splotch suffered a hard-to-take loss that hand. Splotch squinted at Linc, then told him, “Commere, lemme show you something.” When Linc did, Splotch grabbed him by the collar and with a quick move produced a switchblade. “You lil cheatin' white sumbitch, I outta slit your throat,” he said.

Linc screamed and the room went quiet as the women sucked in their breaths and the last note of the harmonica hung and then fell to the floor with the thud of a body dropping, and Linc could feel the chill of the blade against his neck. That's when Sylvia stepped through the door, though nobody noticed her as Buddy pushed back from the table. He spoke to Splotch in a measured voice. “Turn him loose, Splotch. Right now.”

“He cheatin'.” Splotch spit his words. “He passing signals cross the table, I seen it.”

“You saying cheatin' going on in my house?” Buddy said. “Then
you got a dispute wit me, not him. Now drop the blade and fight me like a man.”

Sylvia's total focus was on the knife against the child's neck as she watched a trickle of blood drip between the fingers of the one holding the knife. She gasped as she readjusted the cake and lifted it and held it against her chest as if it were a piece of armor, a breastplate. She did the only thing she could do. She threw the cake in their direction. She grimaced at the sound of her mother's good crystal cake plate shattering, though the sound it made did certainly have the intended result of distracting the man for an instant, enabling Linc to pull away from him.

Linc ran to the dining room, clutching his neck, and sat in the chair under Meda's sketch of Abraham Lincoln. He was shaking as Sylvia followed quickly behind him, calling for a swath of cloth, and some brandy or gin or rye—“Any sort of spirits will do,” she said. She pressed her handkerchief against Linc's neck, relieved to feel no gallop of blood pushing back.

“Beg your pardon, but who are you?” Nola asked, as she produced a jug and a wad of cotton and Sylvia asked her to please douse the cotton with the alcohol.

“She friend to Nevada, aspire to be a nurse,” Miss Ma said. “Do what she askun of you. She siddity from way up there on Addison Street, but she know her trade.”

“I was hoping to deliver Nevada's birthday cake,” Sylvia said, concentrating on exchanging the handkerchief for the alcohol-soaked rag.

“Well, that was one smashing delivery,” Miss Ma said as Linc let out a little yelp at the feel of the alcohol.

“Stings, I know,” Sylvia said to Linc as she pulled back the cotton and leaned in to peer at Linc's neck while Buddy's wife held a lamp over her to give her more light.

“It appears to be just a flesh wound,” she said, as she closed her ears to the profanity-laced tirade emerging from the living room, the sound of a table turning over, of grown men wrestling.

“Well, thank the Lord for that,” Nola said. “Just like my Buddy is in there right this instant whipping Splotch's hind parts, I do believe Buddy's sister woulda killed Splotch by now with her bare hands had Splotch done for-sure harm to this shere boy.”

“Say it true,” Miss Ma said.

“Does she take care of him?” She tilted Linc's neck from side to side to inspect the wound from different angles.

“In a way, I suppose,” Miss Ma said.

“Though it appear to be more complicated from what I gather,” Nola said. “The people who employ Sister allow her to cart him and another little white boy back and forth. Befuddling to me, but I do not speak much on it 'round Buddy. He sensitive 'bout his sister.”

Sylvia continued applying pressure to the cut on Linc's neck. Then she told Linc to open his mouth and motioned for the lamp again as she looked inside. “Can you swallow for me, sweetie?” she asked Linc.

Linc nodded and swallowed, and she asked if it hurt to swallow, and he shook his head no, though his attention was really trained on the living room. Buddy had just stood from where he'd been on top of Splotch, pummeling him, and Splotch picked himself up from the floor; his mouth leaked blood and he cupped his hand under his mouth as he spouted off his attempts at an apology. “I never said you cheated, Buddy, I just cannot figger how you lall this white boy in here anyhow. Like to raising a baby monkey. One day it not gon be so cute. It'll be a full-grown ape that's gonna snatch your balls off right from between your legs and eat 'em for breakfast, and then make you watch while he turn your woman into his wench.” He had backed all the way to the door
and in one swift move pieced through the broken glass of the cake platter to retrieve his switchblade and what was left of his dignity and then was out the door.

Miss Ma had just let go a stream of laughter as Buddy's wife went into the living room to survey the damage. Linc held himself stiffly and choked back sobs. Sylvia could tell that he was trying not to cry. “Can you count from one to one hundred?” she asked Linc.

He nodded, and she lifted his hand and put it against the compress she was holding firm against his neck. “I want you to apply steady pressure just as I am doing. I want you to count very slowly from one to one hundred while you do. Keep the cloth right there until you get to one hundred. Are you able to do that?”

Linc nodded again, grateful really for the distraction. He wanted Meda to be back, he wanted to lean his head against Meda's shoulder. But now he squared his shoulders because Buddy was walking toward him. Buddy was the next best thing to Meda, though in a different way. “How you faring, partner?” Buddy asked him.

“Just a nick,” Miss Ma gasped out, her laughter ending as suddenly as it began. “My granddaughter's friend claims it, and she studying to be a nurse, so what she claims to be, is.”

Buddy glanced at Sylvia for confirmation. “It does not appear to be serious,” Sylvia said, as she watched Buddy's expression spread out in relief. “It looks as if he was holding the child's skin between his fingers so that avoided severing a vein.” She gathered her cape hood around her. “I apologize for the mess I made,” she said, as she started for the living room.

“I made a bigger one,” Buddy said. “And besides, I owe you. Feel free to call in your debt anytime you need sumpin, anytime, anything. My sister love that little boy.”

Sylvia was back in the living room. The musicians and the other card players were righting the turned-over furniture, and
Nola began sweeping the debris. Sylvia leaned down and fished up the wrapped scarf. She slid it into her cape pocket and mumbled out a “Good evening, all,” and then pushed out into the air that was darker now, though suddenly not as cold.

LINC DIDN
'
T TELL
Meda the truth of how he'd gotten the scar on his neck. Nor did Buddy or his wife, Miss Ma, the music-makers, or the men who'd been gathered around the card table that evening. Buddy concocted a tale of a fall, and Meda was satisfied that Linc seemed none the worse as a result. Linc did tell Bram about it, though, the way that Linc told Bram everything that happened at Buddy's house. When Linc got to the part about Splotch talking about Linc growing up to be a full-grown ape who would snatch Buddy's balls off, Bram gasped and grabbed himself between his own legs. “You said nothing in retort?” Bram asked him.

“I had no words,” Linc said. Then he added that he actually did have words, “but by then the miss who would be a nurse was having me open and close my mouth, and I was mad, I mighta woulda cried.”

“Ah, no, Brother,” Bram said as he lowered his head. “Crying in front of Buddy would not be good if he's how you describe him.”

“But he is,” Linc insisted. “Buddy says that men never cry, nor boys who plan on becoming men.” He went on then to describe all else that had happened at Buddy's that day, allowing Bram to feel as if he'd been there, too. Already he'd taught Bram how to curse the way the black men at the table did, showed him how to let a toothpick dangle from the corner of his mouth, how to tell if an opponent across the table was bluffing, how to throw a left hook.

The fighting instruction was particularly useful now at the orphanage, where they were constantly taunted by the other boys because they were favored by Ann, who'd never made a secret of her special affection for them. Ann had held them, after all, and
they had not died. They'd been the reason that Meda had walked into that coal-stained foyer, walked into Ann's life. Every time Ann looked at Linc and Bram, she was grateful to them for that. And though Ann was as quick to hug all of the boys as she was to reprimand them, she'd hug Linc and Bram more, reprimand them less. And they reciprocated in kind. If Meda was like a mother to them, Ann was like a favorite aunt. But then, she left.

MEDA HAD PREPARED
herself for Ann's leaving as much as she could prepare herself for saying goodbye to the person with whom she could shed all of the varieties of skin she'd wear in the course of a day. The only other adult person who'd even come close was her brother, but she'd had to keep that part of herself that had lain with Benin, the part of her that grieved the loss of her infant, hidden from her brother. Ann knew all of that, knew about her claiming Lincoln for her father, knew how'd she'd talk to her mother when she cleaned the penitentiary and her mother would be inside the cell sweeping the floor and Meda would be on the other side looking in and it would feel that one or the other of them was caged and Meda couldn't tell which. “You both were, sweet lady,” Ann had said as they sat close together on the fainting couch in the parlor. And now, almost ten years later, she was telling Ann goodbye and they were both visibly shaken at the ordeal of it. Ann promised that she would send word when Meda could visit. Meda nodded, even though she understood how the world worked, North or South, it did not matter. There was no other space that would accommodate them like this parlor in this orphanage had: expanding and contracting the way Meda reasoned the universe likely did, forming stars out of vast gusts of nothingness to lend sparkle to the night, laughter, a swath of joy, whispers that glittered. A bolide's gleaming fragments. And after that it was time for her to go.

ANN WAS NOT
the only one leaving. Sylvia was, too. But Sylvia's leave was cause for celebration, not heartbreak; a grand send-off, not secret kisses; accolades, not whispered promises that would be difficult to keep.

Sylvia had received an offer for employment to fulfill the position of assistant to the nursing staff at the Lazaretto, the city's immigrant processing and quarantine station that jutted into the Delaware River and connected to Philadelphia at its southernmost point. She thought the position beneath her abilities, she was a fully trained nurse after all, but the possibilities inherent in the position enthralled her. Since every ship hoping to enter the Port of Philadelphia had to be cleared through the Lazaretto during the summer months, she might see firsthand the exotic diseases she'd only read about. She would live there for months at a time. She especially welcomed that. The Lazaretto might prove an escape hatch from a conventional life.

Carl and Sylvia had been keeping steady company since they'd met that day on the wharf. Though there was a period when, at her mother's urgings, she was called upon by a young man, John, more fitting of her attention, or so her mother insisted. His parents owned a prestigious school in Virginia and he was handsome in the most classic way that a black man could be and still be black with his light skin and light eyes and lightly textured hair. His touch was light, too, and initially it was a thrill for Sylvia to have
him escort her to the concert hall, or a public reading, or one of the lavish affairs catered by her parents for a well-to-do's wedding reception, or graduation celebration, or cotillion ball. Though as Sylvia's feelings grew in intensity, she noticed John's seem to recede. He no longer stroked the nape of her neck as they took a carriage ride, or clasped her hands as they walked along the oval. When she confided his turnaround to Nevada, Nevada said she thought Sylvia too good for him and his mulatto-loving people. That he was not the prize, Sylvia was the prize. And then she said no more, until Sylvia pressured her, and then Nevada told her that his parents were likely the cause of his faltering passions; she knew of the highfalutin school his parents ran, and that they measured the color of every child hoping to be admitted to the school against a rub of ground ginger: darker than that and the parents received an I-am-sorry-but letter.

Sylvia, with her middle-of-the road complexion that was neither light nor dark had not really suffered the impediments that she knew shackled the darkest-toned of her race. She was well-educated, cultured—and her father now was a regular lecturer at the Institute for Colored Youth on how to assess catering fees based on the services offered. Her parents owned their own home in the most affluent part of the Seventh Ward. And yet, because she was slightly darker than a rub of ground ginger, she could not pass muster. “I am sorry to hear you report that, Nevada,” Sylvia had said, defiantly. “Fuck them, fuck him”—though she'd only ever used profanity before in her head, or once or twice whispered such a word when no other living thing was in earshot, or if so only Nevada—and then she let go a profanity-laced tirade about John and his family. Said that the Negro race would never progress to its fullest potential because of people like them, who had copied the worst practices of bigoted whites. Nevada laughed, enjoying the sound of Sylvia's cursing as she told Sylvia that Carl
stood head and shoulders above John, above most men, regardless of how her mother felt.

Sylvia knew that part to be true. Carl was certainly a prince of a man. He was loyal, sweet, giving. But her heart did not pound double-time when she thought of him; her world did not spin faster when he approached; his touch was warm, soothing, but there were no explosions, no electric currents running through her at his touch. She loved him as one loves a dear, dear friend, not with a passion; though she could not even claim that she ever loved John with a passion. It was her work that she truly loved. In her most recent position as nurse at the Blockley Almshouse, she felt her whole self involved in what she did. When she was away from work, she was thinking about work, wondering how the one with the broken wrist was faring with the sling she'd fashioned, or had the ginger and garlic soup solved the other's intestinal distress, did the slippery elm relieve the hoarseness, the lavender work for the hysteria. She'd get a rush at times when she'd conjure up a cure, often absent the doctor. She thought that marriage, keeping house, would hinder her ability to work; might curtail it completely. Though Carl seemed encouraging enough now, she feared he might have a change of heart, might insist that, once married, she not work at all. And since she thought Carl such a decent man, she believed that he deserved a woman who saw him as her primary source of passion; he should not have to play second fiddle to her vocation.

Nevada tried to convince her otherwise, “You a loon, Sylvia, if you do not know what you got in Carl. You best hold on to him, he will honor you with all his heart, and allow you your nursing duties besides.”

Sylvia wanted to believe as true what Nevada purported. So she'd tried to deny Carl without causing him to go away completely. When he'd first asked for her hand, she'd replied, “Let us delay such plans until I have completed my schooling.” When
she had graduated, he asked again and she said, “I should rather secure employment first.” He was respectful, patient, and then brokenhearted when she'd begun spending time with John. And now, on this day that she was to report to duty at the Lazaretto, she sensed that he would likely propose again.

She enjoyed the grand send-off at the dock, even though Vergie cried inconsolably and Nevada fought tears, too, as she joked with Sylvia to keep an eye out should a position open up that she could fill since she could use a season's respite from her grandmother's craziness. Sylvia's mother and father hugged her tightly. And then Carl, dear Carl, helped her onto the boat, his boat, as he was doing the honors of escorting her there.

The boat pushed off, and Sylvia waved her handkerchief up and down until those she was leaving appeared the size of stick figures. She settled in next to where Carl steered the boat. The sky hung low and gray; the river slurped excitedly. Carl looked straight ahead toward the seam the sky and river made, and just as she'd sensed that he would, Carl asked Sylvia again for her hand one more time, told her this would be his final ask.

Sylvia cleared her throat, and he held up his hand to stop her. “Listen to me, sweet cakes,” he said. “If it is not the response I been praying on, then please say nothing. At least I can go through the rest of my life with the knowing that although you never said yes, you also never said no. But answer me this: Is it another mister caught your eye?”

“No, no, no, I promise you it is not. It is, is, how shall I say it?”

“By just saying it.”

“It is my work, Carl. I am devoted to it, and you deserve a wife who is devoted to you in kind.”

“Your work? Not some dandy—”

“My work,” Sylvia said as she looked away and watched the river snapping by.

“Your work?” Carl asked again. “How that can be? Curing a fever? Nursing a cough? I am not intend to belittle your work, but, uh your work, Sylvia? Do your work have a beating heart and big old shoulders for you to rest your head on. Do it?”

“No, Carl,” she said and stammered for words to explain. Tried to make him understand that her work had her in situations where she stared down death, and death had won, and she had to respect its power. That through her work she had ushered in new life, and that that had never lost its thrill. But that it was larger even than life and death. “I am able to witness, more than witness, Carl; I am able to participate in the fullness of what it means to be a human being, the shadings and the textures and the variations of life. I am meeting life often at the place where body and soul converge. People at the precipice, a life's course altered. I get lost in the experience of it.”

Carl's brow was wrinkled, his eyes pointed, as if he were trying with his whole being to grasp exactly what she was saying.

“It is not against you, Carl, I promise you that,” Sylvia said. “You are about as perfect a man as I could wish for, but—” She stared at the river as she spoke, hypnotized by the rhythmic splashes; the push-pull of the undercurrent, the aroma of cedar and cod. “I delivered a baby once, it was my first,” she said, as the river egged her on and she was talking now as much to the river as she was to Carl. She described how the pretty, brown-skinned, petite woman was already in the early stages of labor when she'd arrived at the midwife's that day. “She was much too far along for the services that that white lawyer who had escorted her there had requested.”

Carl was listening intently, and he sighed and shook his head. “One of those situations,” he said.

“One of those,” Sylvia repeated, as she went on to detail how excited she became when Dr. Miss directed her to sit on the stool at the foot of the cot, which meant that for the first time she would
take the lead in delivering a baby, and how she'd wanted to do a holy dance as the baby turned its shoulders to come into this life. “Ah,” she said as she stopped to catch her breath, the telling of it had made her breathless.

“I could not see. There was just a scant light from a solitary candle. The light flickered and died completely, probably from my excited yelps that stirred the air in the room. The room went black, and in the portion of a second that it took for my eyes to adjust, the midwife had already covered the baby.”

“Well, there goes a crime: you deliver your first and you do not get to hold it.”

“Oh, but I did get to hold it. I held it to my chest. I slipped my hands under the blanket and cradled the new skin on its back, its first breaths pushed out against the crook of my neck. They were the sweetest breaths, and then the midwife whisked the baby from my hands and instructed me to tend to the mother; she was bleeding quite a bit, and afterward I met with the midwife and the lawyer and they were discussing the outcome, and he was shaken. He did not expect the result of things to be a live birth.” She went on to describe Tom Benin's manner, his meticulous attire, his gold watch that he kept pulling out. Told Carl how at first Tom Benin seemed perfectly willing to allow the midwife to decide on the baby's disposition. But then, just as quickly, he reversed himself. “He told us to tell the mother that her baby girl had succumbed.”

“Son of a white Satan,” Carl said, anger jumping in his voice.

“He instructed the midwife to deliver the baby immediately to his carriage. And I will be always haunted by the tiny pink hand reaching for its mother as she cried out for her baby. The poor baby wanted to answer its mother's cry, wanted to lie against its mother's breast, and I felt as if it was fighting with that reach, fighting to get to its mother, and I was powerless to help the baby, to help the mother. But I was present in that moment, Carl. I was
there, and I did what I did, and if faced with that situation today, perhaps I would handle it differently. But every fiber of my being was engaged. I just always want to be available, to be present in that way. Always.”

“Whew,” Carl said, when she had finished. “I suppose I should take solace that just as I can't compete with that, can't no other man, either. That was stage drama all right, whew. But tell me this, what happened to the mother? Did you stay in touch with her? Or try to?”

“I did not, I would not. In fact, it has been the opposite. What purpose would it serve beyond opening wounds. Not as if I would be at liberty to tell her what truly happened. Besides, it would have been unprofessional to befriend the women who came to the midwife for professional services. And then there is the guilt. My guilt. But I do know that the mother of the baby was quite taken by President Lincoln,” she said, her voice lighter now.

“Name me a Negro who was not, though I must say my brother was not obliged to speak favorably of him after he was paid a lot less than the white soldiers doing the same diligence fighting for the Union. And my brother had to pay from his own purse the price to purchase his own uniform. He faulted Lincoln for not fixing up that situation straightaway as he could have done as the great commander and chief.”

“My father has said a similar thing. I suppose Mr. Lincoln was filled with contraries, as are we all. But this woman seemed almost, dare I say, to posit that she and the president shared a lineage.”

“Really? She look to have white in her?”

“Not to my eye, but if I did not know better, I would think part of her believed that Mr. Lincoln was her father. And, sadly, she gave birth to the baby the same night the president was killed.”

“For true? Two heartbreaks in one night. That hardly seems fair.”

Sylvia went into her satchel and pulled out a notebook and from it slipped a single sheet of parchment. “She gave me this,” she said, as she leaned in and showed him the sketching of Abraham Lincoln.

“Whoa,” Carl said, “who sketched that?”

“She did. Is it not quite good?”

“I'll say. Looks like a true artist drew it.”

Sylvia laughed. “To imagine him winking as she has rendered him here, such a playful expression on his face. She served him tea once, or so she said.”

“Well, was it imaginary tea?”

“Carl, do not be naughty!” Sylvia laughed.

“I mean, she thinks Lincoln is her daddy, who she say her momma is? Queen of Sheba?”

They both laughed then. It was hearty laughter—laughter Sylvia needed that came from a deeper place. The river gurgled in time to her laughter, seagulls made merry in the sky. She laughed so hard until she cried. When she had recovered herself, Carl asked what of the baby girl?

“What of the baby?” Sylvia said, feeling her voice tighten.

“Well, what happened to her?”