The Cosmopolitans (9 page)

“It is substantial.”

Chapter 9

S
o, the textile business was ever booming, and Hortense would not be a burden. Knowing the girl could easily afford a furnished room, and all her meals in luncheonettes or better, intrigued Bette. It wasn't desperation that brought Hortense to her door. She had a higher purpose. Maybe . . . maybe the girl was telling the truth after all. Maybe . . . maybe somewhere out there existed people who actually did tell the truth because they knew no better. Maybe not
everyone
was so dangerously corrupt. Maybe Hortense was . . . a blessing. Finally. The good of Bette's life would actually come to roost. Perhaps Hortense was, after all, not like
them
. Could it be that she was like . . .
us
?

“So, it was a choice to leave your family behind? You were not expelled.”

“I could not breathe in Ohio.”

This was a distinctly admirable response, Bette noted, and then took in that the girl was still standing.

“Please, take a seat.”

Hortense smiled, let go, soared, sweeping into the
apartment, past Bette, to a perch on the windowsill. She didn't choose the chair, so carefully positioned, but the sill itself, so she was pressed against the glass. But instead of looking out, she leaned back into the frame and kicked off her shoes. She smiled, stretched, relaxed. She was pretty and plain like they are in America. Like Bette's people.

“My older brother is married and dull. My sister is about to do the same. And I just cannot go down that path of Ashtabula society luncheons.”

The streetlight came on. Evening was now upon them.

That was the moment when Bette saw it. In the light of the night, illuminating the photo on her mantel and the girl's face. Hortense looked quite a bit like young Frederick. She had that sincerity. That compelling charm and open heart. Perhaps Hortense was more a mixture of Bette and Frederick than of anything else. What Frederick could have been if he had had the courage Hortense displayed. What he could still be.

“I don't want to be
her
child,” Hortense said, unveiling her uncanny instinct to say the perfect thing in the perfect moment. “I want to be yours. Be like you. You're brave and you have escaped. You've been gone for . . .”

“Thirty years.”

“And here I am, come in your footsteps.”

Bette assessed. There were crucial points of agreement between the two of them:

       
(1)
  
Ashtabula, Ohio, is boring. Not worth it. Even thirty years later, everything there was known.

       
(2)
  
New York is not that way.

Bette watched Hortense.
Who would she become here?

The natives, those who were born in the city, learned to crawl on sidewalks. Their palms were callused, and concrete their natural habitat. They thrived. There were the refugees from Europe, China, and the descendants of slaves, brought in chains. These people had nowhere to return to. They had to make things work. Then there were the exiles from America's own provinces, a problematic breed. She had seen many come and go. Some, like Bette, had been thrown away by their own people. But others were in a more ambiguous spot. There was that tenant in apartment 3B who realized he would rather be a big shot in Kalamazoo than one of many on the island of Manhattan. Then there was the girl, Maryanne, they had hired at Tibbs Incorporated to tutor young Hector in English literature. It became clear to Bette, immediately, that Maryanne only wanted to be with people who were exactly like her. Who had all the same holidays. So she took the bus home to Tampa and never looked back. There was the young counterman who worked briefly at Rubin's Deli slicing lox. He missed the sun and the beach and his mother's loving attention. Ultimately he could not find a reason to live without those things and so returned to somewhere near San Diego. And then that fellow who had come to Tenth Street to be a painter but really only wanted the easy life. He was gone in a year, to someplace where . . . she'd forgotten. These were the benign ones. They arrived, did no damage, faced facts, and then went back home with stories to last a lifetime. About all the
characters
they'd met.

The problem, as Bette and Earl had often discussed, was the newcomers who visited “recklessly.” They wandered without restraint, buoyed by an intoxicating imagined safety ever awaiting them at home.
Back there
, eternally somewhere, they pictured
real
people with feelings and needs, deserving of respect, with faith and recognition. While
here
it was a carnival, where no one mattered and all were interchangeable, serving only one purpose: catharsis. These types would then cause havoc on New Yorkers just to see what that felt like, for the experience of acting out on another person. They thought this was freedom. The illusion was that when all the people before them were used up, the perpetrator would simply return to where life mattered. And never look back.

“They never realized,” Earl had said, “that us darker, more solitary types also have hearts.”

Over and over he and Bette watched the newcomers like a spectator sport. When the damage they'd caused had started to accumulate and the mound of consequence had grown unmanageable, the destroyer tried to jump on the Greyhound like a black-hatted cowboy onto his waiting white steed. But, SURPRISE! There was no more sunset to ride off into. There was no one on the other end willing to wire the ticket. The precious, protected home phone number had been disconnected. The others back home had their own problems and ultimately didn't care. In fact,
they
had been counting on
him
to bail them out with some big city fortune, not the other way around. His girl had married someone else. His mother had drunk up every penny he'd sent her. The factory or mine or mill had finally shut down so
there was no work to be had at all. Everyone died. Everyone forgot. No one even liked him in the first place. They'd found Jesus Christ.

Now, the bad fellow was himself stuck forever, face to face with all the pain he had casually created for others, who also had nowhere else to go. Their agony became the rest of his life.

“I don't have a return ticket,” Hortense murmured dreamily. Bette saw that the girl had a guard, and she easily let it down. She felt sure that Bette had accepted her. She was used to talking honestly and had stopped strategizing.

“Why is that?”

“Because, Cousin Bette, I am going to break every rule ever written in Ashtabula to ensure that I can never, ever return.”

“It was true for me,” Bette whispered.

And then the story of Hortense's voyage unfolded. She was a good storyteller. Alert. Walking from the bus terminal that late afternoon, Hortense had felt that everyone she passed on the city street knew the same secrets. But she did not know. This excited and frustrated her. She wanted to be an insider.

“The sidewalks were so crowded, and I continuously bumped into people. It was
so
embarrassing. I apologized and apologized, but it kept happening. Yet they never bumped into each other. Why?”

“Because,” Bette said, remembering that cold night three decades before when twenty-year-old Earl Coleman walked her home from the diner and explained the world. “Because New Yorkers have a special way of
moving. They advance ever forward. By gliding. Little sailboats catching the wind.”

Feeling free and knowledgeable and having
fun
, Bette threaded around her apartment,
gliding
like a swami on his flying carpet, arms akimbo, her feet barely touching the ground. Hortense laughed, and joined her then, the two of them twining around the furniture like fairies on dust. Dancing, really. Playing.

“If you stand on the street like an ox and cart,” Bette stopped still, legs heavy and solid, taking up more space than any city dweller would want or need. She squared her shoulders, an overbuilt wrestler prepared for assault. “Like you are staking your claim. Well, Hortense, you will never get to your destination. We have to share, be aware. We're all on that sidewalk together. This, dear Hortense, is important to know.”

She heard herself say
dear
.

“I want to know.”

What else?

“And look people in the eye.” That also mattered. “But not like you're giving your heart away. Not like, ‘Howdy, neighbor' in an Ashtabula cornfield.”

How strange to use that as a point of reference. Bette had forgotten she'd ever had a childhood landscape. She'd had a life after all, hadn't she?

“Look them in the eye,” she repeated. “Show that you are noticing.”

Again Bette and Hortense flew around the apartment, but this time their eyes were in sync with each other, and again Hortense, a quick learner, never faltered.

“Good girl!”

“I understand!”

“Now you are just one of many human beings and each has a face. No one is a blur. You are acknowledging that face.” Bette stopped, and flopped back into her chair. “It is not intrusive. In fact, recognition is very polite here. People have names that are hard to pronounce.”

Hortense stopped gliding.

“Pronounce them.”

And so the second lesson began. This one unfolded as a Pygmalionesque elocution class on how to finesse the names Shallowitz, Signora Gambetta, Marianna Colón and her son José. With an
s
, not a
z
. How to speak all varieties of English. How to eat grand food. Eat lox, salami, Chianti.

“
Key Auntie?
What's that?”

“It's gorgeous.”

Bette could see the future. Hortense and Bette and Earl drinking Chianti, walking to Chinatown, buying crabs from their markets for supper. Sculptural green vegetables whose names they would never know. Fresh spaghetti hanging in ropes from the ceilings of Italian shops. Round Jewish rolls, called
bagels
, chewy and warm from the boiling vats. Earl pointing and explaining, Bette smiling in the sun. She could imagine this suddenly, now that it was real and before her. She could imagine. Three.

“They must be so happy to be in our country,” Hortense cried out with pride.

Here the romance stopped dead. Bette's face fell. She'd forgotten that arrogance, those misconceptions.
She became stern and separate. That attitude could not be allowed to fester.

“No, Hortense.” Bette's voice was unforgiving. “Ohio is
your
country. You've left your homeland behind. This is
their
country.
You
are the refugee. Hortense, you are the one who will have to adjust.”

“To what?”

Bette thought for a moment.

“To the quiet.”

“Quiet? But it is so noisy here.”

Bette said nothing. She knew from many years of solitude that it was very, very quiet on Tenth Street. For years there could be no sound but one's own breath. Until one day, a strange girl knocked on one's door.

Then, a new sound came into Hortense's life as a key scraped in the lock and the door slowly opened.

Hortense looked up and gasped.

As Hortense's life changed second by second, she had still not been prepared, never imagined, that she would participate in an event like the one that was suddenly before her. No member of her family or community had ever considered in all their years of fantasy, fear, and resistance that Hortense would one day witness an adult Negro man open the front door of her mother's cousin's apartment, with his very own key.

And so, she screamed.

Yes, Earl was home from work.

Earl barely flinched. Of course he saw that terrified white face, so familiar and so banal, so wounding if he let it be, and so he never let it be. What did he care about those idiots? He just smiled with superiority, underlining her lack of worth and his immunity.

“Hello, Bette.”

“Hello, Earl.”

Bette took his jacket off the hook where he had just placed it and hung it on his wooden hanger. She took his bottle of beer and went to get a glass. Leaving Hortense to muddle through this moment on her own and to transform.

Earl smiled at her again. She was nothing.

“Hello,
you
,” he said, bringing her to shame.

Bette returned with the bottle opened and a glass of froth, and handed it to Earl, because he was the king.

“She's from Ohio,” Bette said calmly. “The letter.”

“Ohhhh,” he laughed. “That explains it.” And he drank a rewarding dose of beer.

Before their eyes, Hortense adjusted. She visibly realized that this was a test and that she had to meet the moment. She had to let go of all the stupid rules she had been raised with. The ones designed to confine and control, with no purpose but pain.

“Pleased to meet you. My name is Hortense. I am Bette's cousin.”

White people had white families, a sad fact Earl had learned long ago. Whenever he'd had a white person in his life, he'd wound up having to deal with their ignorant relatives. Look at Anthony. At what happened. There is a lot of baggage that comes along with white people, like the inevitable rest of their race.

Earl looked over at the suitcase by the side of the door. He observed her backward clothing, her bland features, her silly hair.

“Moving to New York?” he said with innuendo.
Another one. You'll never last
.

“Yes,” Hortense smiled, despite her uncertainty.
Was he right about her implied unavoidable failure?
No
, she decided.
He was wrong
. And then she faltered. Was she supposed to say
Yes sir?
Or would
yes
be sufficient. Did real New Yorkers call each other
sir
? She guessed that they did not.

“I've got some lamb chops to cook,” Bette announced, and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Earl put down his glass professorially, scratched his chin and walked around the privileged urchin with an air of species investigation.