The Women of Brewster Place (8 page)

The lawyer called at the end of the second week to remind them of the court appointment, and Basil grew irritable. He told her he hated the thought of that place. He had tried to pretend that it didn’t exist, and he had been so happy. Now this. What if something went wrong and they kept him again? You couldn’t trust those honky lawyers—what did they care about him? Those people in that bar weren’t friends of his—what if they changed their stories? What if the girl hated him now and decided to lie? He remembered the way she had screamed over the dead man’s body. Yes, she would lie to get back at him. He knew it.

“I’ll blow my brains out before I spend my life in jail,” he said to Mattie while driving her to work.

“Basil, stop talkin’ stupidness!” Her voice was sharp. She had not been able to sleep well the last two nights, lying and
listening to him pacing around in his room. “I’ve been hearing nothing but nonsense the last coupla days, and I’m sick of it.”

“Nonsense!” He swung his head around.

“Yes, damned nonsense! You ain’t going to jail ’cause you ain’t done nothing to go to jail for. We go to court Tuesday; they’ll give all the evidence, and you’ll be clear. That’s all there is to it. The lawyer said so, and he should know.”

“Mama, he’ll say anything to get your money. If someone offered him a nickel more than you paid, he’d throw me in jail personally and swallow the key. You don’t know them like I do, and you don’t know what it’s like in those cells. And they’ll send me to a worse place than some county jail.” He looked at her sorrowfully. “I couldn’t stand it, Mama. I just couldn’t.”

Mattie sighed, turned her head from him, and looked out the window. There was nothing to say. Whatever was lacking within him that made it impossible to confront the difficulties of life could not be supplied with words. She saw it now. There was a void in his being that had been padded and cushioned over the years, and now that covering had grown impregnable. She bit on her bottom lip and swallowed back a sob. God had given her what she prayed for—a little boy who would always need her.

She felt him looking at her turned head from time to time and knew he was puzzled by her silence. He was waiting to be coaxed and petted into a lighter mood, but she forced herself to keep staring out the window. When the car pulled up to her job, she mumbled a good-bye and reached for the latch. Basil grabbed her hand, leaned over, and kissed her cheek.

“Good-bye, Mama.”

She was touched by the gentleness in his caress and immediately repentant of her attitude in the car. During the day she resolved to make amends to him. After all, he was under a great deal of pressure, and it wasn’t fair that he bear it alone. Was it so wrong that he seemed to need her constant
support? Had he not been trained to expect it? And he had been trying so hard those last two weeks; she couldn’t let him down now. She would go home and make him a special dinner—creamed chicken with rice—he always loved that. Then they would sit and talk, and she would tell him, once again, or as many times as needed, that it was going to be all right.

Basil wasn’t waiting for Mattie when she finished work, so she took the bus home and stopped by the store to pick up the things she needed for his dinner. She walked up the street and saw that his car wasn’t parked out front and the house was dark. She stood for a moment by the front gate, first looking at the space where the car should be and then at the unlit windows. Normally she would have gone through the front door, taken off her coat, and hung it in the front hall closet. Tonight she entered the house through the back door that led straight into the kitchen. She took off her coat and laid it on one of the kitchen chairs. There was an extra jacket of his in the front hall closet that would not be there.

She washed her hands at the sink and immediately started to cut up the chicken and peel and slice vegetables. Her feet were beginning to ache, but her house slippers were in the living room, under a table where his portable radio would not be, so she limped around her kitchen while finishing his dinner. She let the water run in the sink longer than necessary and dropped her knife and set the pots on the stove with a fraction of extra force. She made as much noise as she could to ward off the stillness of the upstairs bedroom that kept trying to creep into her kitchen, carrying empty drawers and closets, a vacant space where a suitcase had lain, missing toothpaste. She banged pot lids and beat sauces in aluminum bowls until her arms were tired. She watched and fussed over his dinner, opening and closing the oven door a dozen times—anything to keep back the stillness until he would drive up in his car, say he had come to his senses, sit down and eat her creamed chicken, save a lifetime of work lying in the bricks of her home.

The vegetables were done, the chicken almost burnt, and the biscuits had to come out of the oven. She turned off the gas jets, opened the oven door, and banged the pan of biscuits onto the counter top. She looked frantically at the creeping shadows over her kitchen door and rushed to the cabinet and took out plates and silverware. She slammed the cabinet shut and slowly and noisily set the table for two. She looked pleadingly around the kitchen, but there was nothing left to be done. So she pulled out the kitchen chair, letting the metal legs drag across the tiles. Trembling, she sat down, put her head in her hands, and waited for the patient and crouching stillness just beyond the kitchen door.

A hand touched her shoulder, and Mattie gave a small cry.

“Didn’t mean to startle you, mam, but it’s snowing pretty bad, and we gotta move this stuff upstairs. Would you please go up and unlock the door?”

At first Mattie looked vacantly into the face of the man, and then her mind snapped into place from its long stretch over time. The cab had just backed out of Brewster Place, and she watched it turn down the avenue and drive away. Her eyes trailed slowly along the cracked stoops and snowfilled gutters until they came to her building. She glanced at the wall and, with an inner sigh, remembered her plants again.

The mover who had addressed her was staring at her uncomfortably.

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry,” she said disconcertedly. “I have the keys right here, don’t I?” And she opened her pocketbook and started searching for them.

The two men looked at each other, and one shrugged his shoulders and pointed his finger toward his head.

Mattie grasped the cold metal key in one hand and put the other on the iron railing and climbed the stoop to the front entrance. As she opened the door and entered the dingy hallway, a snowflake caught in her collar, melted, and rolled down her back like a frozen tear.

The unpainted walls of the long rectangular room were soaked with the smell of greasy chicken and warm, headless beer. The brown and pink faces floated above the trails of used cigarette smoke like bodiless carnival balloons. The plump yellow woman with white gardenias pinned to the side of her head stood with her back pressed against the peeling sides of the baby grand and tried to pierce the bloated hum in the room with her thin scratchy voice. Undisturbed that she remained for the most part ignored, she motioned for the piano player to begin
.

It wasn’t the music or the words or the woman that took that room by its throat until it gasped for air—it was the pain. There was a young southern girl, Etta Johnson, pushed up in a corner table, and she never forgot. The music, the woman, the words
.

Children bloomed on Brewster Place during July and August with their colorful shorts and tops plastered against gold, ebony, and nut-brown legs and arms; they decorated the street, rivaling the geraniums and ivy found on the manicured boulevard downtown. The summer heat seemed to draw the people from their cramped apartments onto the stoops, as it drew the tiny drops of perspiration from their foreheads and backs.

The apple-green Cadillac with the white vinyl roof and Florida plates turned into Brewster like a greased cobra. Since Etta had stopped at a Mobil station three blocks away to wash off the evidence of a hot, dusty 1200-mile odyssey home, the chrome caught the rays of the high afternoon sun and flung them back into its face. She had chosen her time well.

The children, free from the conditioned restraints of their older counterparts, ran along the sidewalks flanking this curious, slow-moving addition to their world. Every eye on the block, either openly or covertly, was on the door of the car when it opened. They were rewarded by the appearance of a pair of white leather sandals attached to narrow ankles and slightly bowed, shapely legs. The willow-green sundress, only ten minutes old on the short chestnut woman, clung to a body that had finished a close second in its race with time. Large two-toned sunglasses hid the weariness that had defied the freshly applied mascara and burnt-ivory shadow. After taking twice the time needed to stretch herself, she reached into the back seat of the car and pulled out her plastic clothes bag and Billie Holiday albums.

The children’s curiosity reached the end of its short life span, and they drifted back to their various games. The adults
sucked their teeth in disappointment, and the more envious felt self-righteousness twist the corners of their mouths. It was only Etta. Looked like she’d done all right by herself—this time around.

Slowly she carried herself across the street—head high and eyes fixed unwaveringly on her destination. The half-dozen albums were clutched in front of her chest like cardboard armor.

Any who bothered to greet her never used her first name. No one called Etta Mae “Etta,” except in their minds; and when they spoke to each other about her, it was Etta Johnson; but when they addressed her directly, it was always Miss Johnson. This baffled her because she knew what they thought about her, and she’d always call them by their first names and invited them to do the same with her. But after a few awkward attempts, they’d fall back into the pattern they were somehow comfortable with. Etta didn’t know if this was to keep the distance on her side or theirs, but it was there. And she had learned to tread through these alien undercurrents so well that to a casual observer she had mastered the ancient secret of walking on water.

Mattie sat in her frayed brocade armchair, pushed up to the front window, and watched her friend’s brave approach through the dusty screen. Still toting around them oversized records, she thought. That woman is a puzzlement.

Mattie rose to open the door so Etta wouldn’t have to
struggle to knock with her arms full. “Lord, child, thank you,” she gushed, out of breath. “The younger I get, the higher those steps seem to stretch.”

She dumped her load on the sofa and swept off her sunglasses. She breathed deeply of the freedom she found in Mattie’s presence. Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets.

“Sit on down and take a breather. Must have been a hard trip. When you first said you were coming, I didn’t expect you to be driving.”

“To tell the truth, I didn’t expect it myself, Mattie. But Simeon got very ornery when I said I was heading home, and he refused to give me the money he’d promised for my plane fare. So I said, just give me half and I’ll take the train. Well, he wasn’t gonna even do that. And Mattie, you know I’ll be damned if I was coming into this city on a raggedy old Greyhound. So one night he was by my place all drunk up and snoring, and as kindly as you please, I took the car keys and registration and so here I am.”

“My God, woman! You stole the man’s car?”

“Stole—nothing. He owes me that and then some.”

“Yeah, but the police don’t wanna hear that. It’s a wonder the highway patrol ain’t stopped you before now.”

“They ain’t stopped me because Simeon didn’t report it.”

“How you know that?”

“His wife’s daddy is the sheriff of that county.” Laughter hung dangerously on the edge of the two women’s eyes and lips.

“Yeah, but he could say you picked his pockets.”

Etta went to her clothes bag and pulled out a pair of pink and red monogrammed shorts. “I’d have to be a damned good pickpocket to get away with all this.” The laughter lost
its weak hold on their mouths and went bouncing crazily against the walls of the living room.