Tar Baby (16 page)

He was not alarmed by her visits; he knew he conjured them up himself, just as he conjured up old friends and childhood playmates who were clearer to him now than the last thirty years were, and nicer. But he was astonished to see—unconjured—his only living son in the dining room last night. Probably the consequence of describing the sink business to Jade. Michael seemed to be smiling at him last night but not the smile of derision he usually had in the flesh; this was a smile of reconciliation. And Valerian believed that was part of the reason he invited the black man to have a seat, the forepresence of Michael in the dining room. His face smiling at him from the bowl of peaches was both the winsome two-year-old under the sink and the thirty-year-old Socialist. The face in the peaches compelled him to dismiss Margaret’s screaming entrance as the tantrum of a spoiled child, the deliberate creation of a scene, which both father and son understood as feminine dementia. Michael had been on his heart if not in his mind since Margaret had announced the certainty of his visit. He could not say to her that he hoped far more than she did that Michael would come. That maybe this time there would be that feeling of rescue between them as it had been when he had taken him from underneath the sink. Thus when the black man appeared, Valerian was already in complicity with an overripe peach, and took on its implicit dare. And he invited the intruder to have a drink. The Michael of the reservation and the Michael of the sink was both surprised and pleased.

It was easy not to believe in Margaret’s hysteria; he had seen examples of it many times before and thought she was up to her old combo of masochism plus narcissism that he believed common to exceptionally beautiful women. But when, in a flash too speedy for reflex, he saw his entire household standing there, and in each of their faces disgust and horror, and all together triumphant, and all together anticipating his command, already acting on it in fact, just waiting for the signal from him to call the harbor police and thereby make him acknowledge his mistake in not taking Margaret seriously, having to admit that he was not capable of judgment in a crisis, that he was wrong, that she was right, that his house had been violated and he neither knew it or believed it when it was discovered and it had been Sydney who had the foresight to have a gun and the legs to ferret out the intruder, when he saw Margaret’s triumphant face, Jade’s frightened one, and Sydney and Ondine looking at the prisoner with faces as black as his but smug, their manner struck him as what Michael meant when he said “bourgeois” in that tone that Valerian always thought meant unexciting, but now he thought meant false, but last night he thought meant Uncle Tom-ish. He had defended his servants vigorously to Michael then, with aphorisms about loyalty and decency and with shouts that the press was ruining with typical carelessness the concept of honor for a people who had a hard enough time achieving any. What he had said to Jade, he believed: that Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain. Valerian hated them, not from any hatred of the minority or alien culture, but because of what he saw to be the falseness and fraudulence of the anthropological position. The Indian problem, he told Michael, was between Indians, their conscience and their own derring-do. And all of his loving treks from ghetto to reservation to barrio to migrant farm were searches for people in whose company the Michaels could enjoy the sorrow they were embarrassed to feel for themselves. And yet, in the space of that flash he felt not only as Michael must have when he urged Jade to do something for her people (no matter how silly his instruction), but something more. Disappointment nudging contempt for the outrage Jade and Sydney and Ondine exhibited in defending property and personnel that did not belong to them from a black man who was one of their own. As the evening progressed, Valerian thoroughly enjoyed the disarray that his invitation had thrown them into. Margaret ran from the room—foiled. Jade was at least sophisticated about it, but Sydney and Ondine were wrecked while the intruder himself didn’t even look “caught.” He walked in with his hands raised and clasped behind his head and looked neither right nor left—not at Jade or Ondine or Margaret, but straight at Valerian and in his eyes was neither a question nor a plea. And no threat whatsoever. Valerian was not afraid then and he was not afraid at noon the next day, when Sydney tapped quietly on his door and brought his mail and his baked potato. Valerian could sense the small waiting in Sydney, some expectation or hope that his employer would give him a hint of what had been in his head last night. Valerian felt a twinge of compassion for him, but since he could not tell him about faces that looked up out of peaches, he said nothing at all.

Actually he had no plans. He was curious about the man, but not all that much. He assumed he was what he’d said he was: a crewman jumping ship, and his roaming about the house and grounds, hiding in Margaret’s closet, was more outrageous than threatening. He had looked into the man’s eyes and had no fear.

Digesting his potato and sipping wine, he was rewarded for his serenity by an expansive “Howdy” followed by the entrance of the stranger wrapped in a woman’s kimono, barefoot with gleaming wrought-iron hair.

Valerian let his eyes travel cautiously down from the hair to the robe to the naked feet. The man smiled broadly. He looked down at himself, back at Valerian and said, “But I don’t do no windows.”

Valerian laughed, shortly.

“Good morning, Mr. Sheek,” said the man.

“Street. Valerian Street,” said Valerian. “What did you say your name was?”

“Green. William Green.”

“Well, good morning, Willie. Sleep well?”

“Yes, sir. Best sleep I ever had. Your name really Valerian?”

“Yes.” Valerian shrugged helplessly and smiled.

“I used to eat a candy called Valerians.”

“Ours,” said Valerian. “Our candy company made them.”

“No kiddin? You named after a candy?”

“The candy was named after me. I was named after an emperor.”

“Oh,” said the man looking around the greenhouse. Its sudden coldness was delicious after the heat outside. Shady and cool with plants shooting from pots and boxes everywhere. “It’s sho pretty in here,” he said, still smiling.

“Tell me the truth,” said Valerian, “before you get confused by what you see. What were you really doing in my wife’s bedroom?”

The man stopped smiling. “The truth?” He looked down at the brick walk in some embarrassment. “The truth is I made a mistake. I thought it was the other one.”

“What other one?”

“The other bedroom.”

“Jade’s?”

“Yes, sir. I uh thought I smelled oyster stew out back yesterday. And it got dark early, the fog I mean. They done left the kitchen and I thought I’d try to get me some, but before I knew it I heard them coming back. I couldn’t run out the back door so I run through another one. It was a dinin room. I ran upstairs into the first room I seen. When I got in I seen it was a bedroom but thought it belonged to the one y’all call Jade. I aimed to hide there till I could get out, but then I heard somebody comin and I ducked into the closet. I was just as scared as your wife was when she opened that door and turned that light on me.”

“You’ve been skulking around here for days. Why didn’t you ask at the kitchen for something to eat?”

“Scared. I ain’t got a passport, I told you. You going to turn me over to the police?”

“Well, not in that get-up certainly.”

“Yeah.” He glanced at his kimono again and laughed. “They’d give me life. I don’t reckon you have an old suit to lend me? Then I can go to jail in style.”

“In one of my suits they’d make you governor. I’ll tell Sydney to find something for you. But don’t be surprised if he bites your head off.”

Suddenly the man jumped and stamped his feet on the bricks.

“What’s the matter?”

“Ants,” he said.

“Oh dear. You’ve let them in, and I’m out of thalomide.” Valerian stood up. “Over there, that can. Spray the doorsill. It won’t do much good, but it will help for a while, and tuck that muslin in tighter.”

The man did as he was told and then said, “You ought to get mirrors.”

“Mirrors for what?”

“Put outside the door. They won’t come near a mirror.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, and sprayed some of the ant killer on his legs. His kimono came undone at the belt and fell away from his body. Valerian looked at his genitals and the skinny black thighs. “You can’t go round like that in front of the ladies. Leave that alone, and go tell Sydney to give you some clothes. Tell him I said so.”

The man looked up letting the kimono hang to his sides. “You ain’t gonna turn me in?”

“I guess not. You didn’t take anything, but we’ll have to figure a way to get you some papers. Go on now. Get some clothes.” Valerian took the ant spray and set it down near a heavy plant of many shades of green. Its leaves spread out healthily and long stems stood straight up among them. Stems with closed buds. Valerian peered into the plant and frowned.

“What’s the matter with it?” asked the man. “Looks sick.”

Valerian turned the pot around for a different view. “I don’t know. It’s been in bud like that for I don’t know how long. They won’t open no matter what I do.”

“Shake it,” said the man. “They just need jacking up.” And he walked over to the cyclamen and with thumb and middle finger flicked the stems hard as though they were naughty students.

“What the hell are you doing?” Valerian reached out to grab the man’s hand.

“Don’t worry. They’ll be in bloom tomorrow morning.”

“If they are I’ll buy you a brand-new suit; if they die I’ll have Sydney chase you back into the sea.”

“Deal!” said the man. “I know all about plants. They like women, you have to jack them up every once in a while. Make em act nice, like they’re supposed to.” He finished flicking the cyclamen stems and smiled first to himself and then at Valerian. “Did you ever hear the one about the three colored whores who went to heaven?”

“No,” said Valerian. “Tell me.” And he did and it was a good joke. Very funny and when Jadine ran to the greenhouse certain the noise coming from it was somebody murdering somebody she heard laughter to beat the band.

S
YDNEY
had put some of his boss’s old clothes in the guest room for him, and Valerian sent him off with Gideon to get a haircut, because Sydney refused flat out to cut it. Valerian half expected the man would get into town and not return, since he had given him enough money to buy some underwear and some shoes that fit him better than his did. While Valerian had dinner alone that night served by a silent steeping butler, and while Margaret pouted in her room and Jadine ate with Ondine in the kitchen, Mr. Green alias Son drifted off with Gideon and Thérèse in the
Prix de France.
With country people’s pride in a come-from-far guest, they paraded the American Negro through the streets of town like a king. Gideon even got one of his friends to give them a free taxi ride to the outskirts of town, and then they had to walk and walk and walk up into the hills to Place de Vent before they reached the powder pink house where he lived with Thérèse and, sometimes, Alma Estée.

Thérèse was in ecstasy and kept moving her head about the better to see him out of her broken eyes. As soon as they had got ashore she let it be known to every island Black she saw that they had a guest, a visitor from the States, and that he was going to spend the night. Her pride and her message ran all over the streets and up the hillside, and at various times during the evening, heads poked in her doorway, and neighbors dropped by on some pretense or other. Thérèse sent Alma Estée flying back down the hill to the market for a packet of brown sugar, and she went into the bag that hung by her side under her dress for money for goat meat and two onions. Then she brewed black thick coffee while she listened to the men talk and waited her turn. Gideon told her stories on Isle des Chevaliers, but here at home he did not socialize with her—he kept to himself or spent his free time with old cronies. Only at work on the island of the rich Americans did he entertain her. Now she was to be privy to the talk between them, and in her house at that. She would also have a chance to ask the American Black herself whether it was really so that American women killed their babies with their fingernails. She waited until Gideon had cut his hair with clippers he’d borrowed from the man who sold rum. Waited until great clouds of glittering graphite hair fell to the floor and on the bedspread they had wrapped around the man’s neck and the front of his whole body. Waited until Gideon was through with his boasts about when he was in the States, boasts about the nurse he had married, the hospital he had worked in, the hatefulness of that nurse and all American women. Waited until Gideon had lied about all the money he made there and why he returned home. Waited until the stranger who ate chocolate and drank bottled water was properly shorn and his neck dusted with baking soda, and Alma Estée was back and the meat was frying on the two-burner stove. Waited till they ate it and drank coffee loaded with sugar. Waited till they opened the bottle of rum and the chocolate eater had coughed like a juvenile with his first taste of it. Thérèse served the two men but did not eat with them. Instead she stood at the portable stove burning the hair she had swept up from the floor, burning it carefully and methodically with many glances at the chocolate eater to show him she meant him no evil. When they had eaten and Thérèse had grown accustomed to the rhythm of their guest’s English, she joined them at the table. Alma Estée sat on the cot by the window.

Son smoked Gideon’s cigarettes and poured the rest of the rum into his coffee. He stretched his legs and permitted himself a hearthside feeling, comfortable and free of postures and phony accents. The tough goat meat, the smoked fish, the pepper-hot gravy over the rice settled in him. It had been served all on one plate and he knew what the delicacies had cost them: the sweet, thick cookies, the canned milk and especially the rum. The nakedness of his face and head made him vulnerable, but his hosts gave him adoration to cover it. Alma Estée had taken off her short print dress and returned in her best clothes—a school uniform—but Son knew right away that she had not had school tuition for a long time now. The uniform was soiled and frayed. He could feel her waves of desire washing over him and for the first time in years he felt like a well-heeled man. Thérèse urged him on into a feast of plantain and fried avocado, then leaned toward him in the lamplight, her broken eyes cheerful, and asked him, “Is it true? American women reach into their wombs and kill their babies with their fingernails?”