Black Tickets (10 page)

Walking down the slanted floor to our seats we heard the swish of her thighs behind the candy counter and our shoes sliding on the worn carpet. The heavy velvet curtain moved its folds. We waited, and a cavernous dark pressed close around us, its breath pulling at our faces.

After the last blast of sound it was Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Penny stood jingling his keys by the office door while we asked to use the phone. Before he turned the key he bent over and pulled us close with his bony arms. Stained fingers kneading our chests, he wrapped us in old tobacco and called us his little girls. I felt his wrinkled heart wheeze like a dog on a leash. Sweethearts, he whispered.

I
N
1934 I was seven years old. Bellington, Virginia, was a Depression town. My mother was twenty-eight, my father fifty, my grandmother sixty-two. We lived in a big falling house in the center of town; but in those days, forty years ago, even town people had some land, barns in back. We had cows, some chickens. If it weren’t for them we’d have starved because my father was crazy.

All morning my grandmother, Jocasta Andora, churned butter on the porch. I believed she hid a rat in the tall urn. Determined, scowling, she beat it to death every day. Nonstop, blunt tick of a clock. She kept her white hair twisted in braids and wore a man’s wire glasses with bent frames. She got up at five with Lacey, my mother, and started as soon as the cows were milked: pounding, pounding, pounding. She kept on until eight when we left in the cart and she walked over the hill to give blind Aunt Jenny her insulin shot. Until
then I had to stand beside her while she molded the pale yellow bricks. I had to run them to the icehouse while she flicked at my heels with a broom.

“Run! Run! Before the mold smears! You’ll be your father’s daughter yet …”

Lacey and I delivered milk and butter and eggs in a cart. Some mornings our neighbor Johannes helped us load up. Tall and blond, Swedish, he said our names in a singsong. He had the high, broad forehead of a child, and a wife who seldom spoke. As we rattled away in the cart he raised an arm and held it, motionless, until we were out of sight. Lacey never turned.

She had a red account book the size of my palm. I held it in my lap, read names and orders over clinks and grumbles of the cart. Lacey’s chestnut hair strayed in her eyes. She had one muslin dress she saved to deliver orders; said she refused to look poor in the shops. Storekeepers on Main Street stopped us, asked after J.T. She’d say he was improving thank you. They shook their heads, he was a compatriot who’d deserted them. Besides, everyone in town knew he was only getting worse. Weekly, he’d start downtown in the middle of the street, shirtless, in his nightcap. He wouldn’t budge for horses or autos. Just kept striding, shaking back his long hair, probably to the bank to demand his money. Of which there’d been none for five years.

“Take off your pants, J.T.!” Jocasta snarled it from the kitchen, sometimes she yelled it from the window. “If you take off your pants, they’ll make her put you away!”

Lacey rushed to the door after him.

“No, Lacey,” sighed Jocasta. “Let the child.”

So I was sent.

“Pop, the Gypsies are at the house.”

“Eh, what? What?”

“The Gypsies, Pop, they’re ready to pay.”

He’d mumble about settling accounts, let me take his hand, lead him to the wooden sidewalk. We’d go home.

Some days he appeared to be lucid, though he never acknowledged he was poor. Every morning after breakfast he went to his office on the top floor, dressed in his old spats and a bow tie. He had all his account books up there, boxes of them, and he notated every page. He’d been through them all several times; drawing minute red lines and arrows through the words, and quotes from Shakespeare. He imagined I was a boy, his partner in the business. I had one of his cigars I’d chew and pretend to smoke. He’d light it for me, leaning forward, rippling his thick brows, intent on his hand and a cupped flame that wasn’t there. His close breath smelled of soap and tobacco. Fine black hair thickened at his wrists. He wore gold cuff links on his shabby shirts.

We could see the whole town from our third-floor windows: Main Street curving down under oaks to where the river curled in a turn, gas-lit globes on the bridge, the junkman on his bicycle. Our tall windows were set thickly in walnut; dark stain dried and flaking to let the wood show naked. Dust floated in the shafted light. J.T.’s lips were the dark pink of sexual flush. He had begun to age with a strength and promise of frailty, flesh across his broad-boned face gone a faint rose in the blue shadow of his beard. He called me Frank instead of Francine.

“Now, Frank. Mr. Southern will arrive here approximately noon. I want you to go down by the river and oversee the cutting. I’ll keep him busy here until the wood is stacked.”

Southern was a big New England account he’d lost before the mill dissolved. J.T. was once a rich man, owned the biggest lumber operation in the state. He had a whole
town of look-alike workers’ shacks down by the river in Hampton, ten miles from town. Now they were empty, all the blind cracked glass broken out. My mother eloped with him when he had four grown kids older than she, the finest house in Bellington (historical societies offered to buy us out every year), and lumber operations in six towns. When they came into the station on the train after the wedding trip, his workers lined the tracks and cheered.

“Tail chaser,” Jocasta sneered at him. “Out chasing tail every spare minute. No wonder you lost everything. Credit to Gypsies!” she snorted.

“Mother,” said Lacey. “What’s done is done.”

“Yes, and it’s done to us. You ought to put him away. He’s nothing but a cross.”

She and J.T. had fights. Sometimes he’d sneak up and pretend to pick lice off her clothes. I liked that. He would nip at her hair with his fingers until her combs fell out, Jocasta’s silver hair falling down all around her. She screamed in fury. Her erotic hair was dangerous; loosened only late at night in her room, thick, blue-silver halfway to her knees. She stayed alone, combing, behind the locked door. Brushing, she watched her circular mirror; sang her high wheedling hum that floated up to my third-floor bed. Across the hall in his room my father listened too. He seemed never to sleep; all night his dim light burned. I saw Jocasta’s hair hanging to the rungs of her chair. Yes, I believed I saw it. I wanted to touch her hair. I wanted to wrap myself up in her secretive hair. Ten years later when Jocasta died, I helped Lacey comb out the long and menacing hair. It felt like the mane of a horse.

J.T. used his full charmed strength against Jocasta. She
threw every pot in the kitchen at him. Occasionally he threw them back. Lacey and I stood and watched, she yelling “Mother! Not the breakables!” Jocasta picked up something to throw every time he came near her. When she churned, he came up behind her. She’d grab one of the heavy butter molds.

“J.T., you’d look well if I hit you between the eyes with this.” She stood facing him, brandishing the mold and holding to her glasses with one hand.

Lacey’s father, Jocasta’s husband, Herbert, owned a hotel where J.T. used to stay the night on business trips. The first time Lacey saw J.T. she was sixteen, night clerk at the check-in desk. J.T. was thirty-eight, a powerful full-chested man with jet-black hair, a boutonniere and gold-tipped cane. He gave Lacey a diamond wrapped in a handkerchief and said she would marry him. For a year Jocasta kept it from happening, then Herbert died of cirrhosis and Lacey eloped. Jocasta raved on about cursed women and bad choice.

“God knows your father was a wretch. You should have done a sight better in picking one for this child.”

Lacey had brown eyes of a depth and shine that always looked welled with tears. “Mother,” she said, “You know they were both so charming and fine.”

“And what does charm get you? A lunatic or a drunkard. If you’d had a decent father yourself you’d never have tried to marry one, an old man.”

“Mother, he wasn’t old. He’s still not old.”

“To a girl of sixteen a man near forty is old, or should be. I tried to tell you that too, a dog that’ll carry a bone will bring one. You were a child. He was six years younger than your own father.”

“That’s just because you robbed the cradle.”

“It’s best for a woman to marry a younger man. Women
outlast men, we’re both proof. They don’t have our stamina. Marry a young one and you can count on him to bury you.”

“Mother, Herbert died long before you will.”

“Only because he drank.” She sniffed and lifted her chin.

Jocasta kept a locked iron box under her bed. She kept all the baubles J.T. had lavished on Lacey during their courtship. She maintained that those jewels were our security. She even bought back necklaces and watches J.T. had given his mistresses. Wrote letters all over the state offering to buy or trade for them. Then she wrapped them in clean rags and put them in the box. Kept her door locked, carried a long skeleton key on a thin gold chain fastened to her belt.

Jocasta was obsessed with money. All her life she’d barely held on to it, managing the hotel while Herbert drank away the profits. Over and over, she tried to talk Lacey into selling J.T.’s old car, a 1928 Ford locked in the garage. J.T. had it polished until light glanced off like a knife, but he kept driving it top speed down the sidewalks and the town council got out an injunction. Sometimes he walked out at night, looked in the round garage window at the car shining in old smells and dark.

“That car sits out there for six years while we struggle to feed ourselves. That money could roof the barn and buy us another cow. Francine’s getting old enough to milk, she can assume her share of the load—”

“Assume her share? She’s seven years old and she’s seen to J.T. this past year, something you nor I can manage.”

“Well, I mean with the economy of the household. If we don’t sell that car soon, there won’t be a soul left in town with money to buy it.”

“There isn’t a soul now.”

“Yes there is. John Simpson asked me about the car yesterday. I was down at the bank and—”

“Simpson! Just the one J.T. would hate to have it. That man profits on trouble, he’s a sniveling crook. I still think there was something shady about the Trust.”

The Trust was a fairy tale of which I often heard. When I was born, my father set up a trust to be awarded me when I was ten. Simpson said that when J.T. got so deep in debt that the mill was at stake, he revoked the trust to cover deficits. He lost the mill anyway. Simpson had papers J.T. had supposedly signed, but Lacey thought he’d signed them himself and embezzled the money, covered it somehow with his shifty lawyer mind. She called in other lawyers.

“Gentlemen,” Simpson told them. “A shame J.T., a man of stature surely, lost his reason, but the facts speak for themselves. Fifty thousand dollars for a child of ten? Isn’t that in itself a little illogical? I tended J.T.’s business as long as possible. We were friends for years, but you can’t save a man who’s drowning.”

Lacey told how he sat there in his big chair looking sorrowful. Simpson weighed three hundred pounds. His limpid blue eyes slanted almost Asian at the corners; he moved his big body with a feline ease. His lips had a swollen look. He pursed them, touched my neck when I delivered milk on Main Street. He stroked me, lightly, with his manicured hand. Lacey looked stiffly away. Once he leaned into the cart, got close to her over my head and talked to her low and breathy.

“You needn’t be so high and mighty,” he said. “I could do things for you in this town.”

I kicked him hard in the center of his fleshy chest. My boot left a black print that pointed at his throat as he cursed and we drove off “Damn you! She’s the seed of her father! They’ll both end in the asylum! To hell with you!”

Bottles bounced and clinked in the cart. I asked if it was true I’d go crazy.

“Of course not. You’re like the women in the family, sound as a dollar.”

“But Grandmother says I’m like him.”

“Don’t pay mind to that. She’s just jealous because she didn’t love her father like you love yours.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was an invalid who smelled of camphor and never got out of bed. He used to make her tie her wrist to the arm of her chair and do needlepoint while he took his naps. He lectured her on demons. He was an evil old man.”

“Lacey,” I said. “I don’t know if I love my father. He doesn’t even know I’m a girl. Sometimes I hate him.”

“I know, Francie, sometimes I do too.”

My father’s secrets chased us all. At fifty he was still a big man with powerful arms. His grayed hair curled thick and long over his collar before he’d let Lacey cut it. Every few weeks he’d get to drinking. Be docile, childish, speak to Lacey as though she were his mother. She’d tie a bib around his neck, sit him down, shave him and cut his hair.

After he was spruced up he’d grow thoughtful. Walk slowly upstairs in his bare feet, shower, put on aftershave and his green silk vest. He’d put on his straw boater, still almost new because he seldom wore it, and walk to the drugstore after candy.

“Oh, Lord,” groaned Jocasta as he came down the steps.

Lacey hushed her, said, “Francie, go after him.”

And I’d walk him downtown. “Frank, my boy,” he’d say, and put his arm around me. He’d tip his hat to all the women. He was a very handsome man, my father. He’d fairly swagger with happiness, and everyone on the street spoke to him. They’d nod and shake hands eagerly, the men anxious to talk. At the dry goods store, he’d ask Mrs. Carvey about her children.

“How’s Bill doing in the sand lots? That boy has a genuine pitcher’s arm, Miranda, he should have training, it’s a fact.”

Bill had grown and gone before my father married my mother, but Mrs. Carvey went on just like he was nine years old. Her husband was dead; she was lonely. She’d get feeling so good she’d pile me up with remnants to take home. That was how Lacey made my clothes.

Then we’d go down to Farmer’s Drug. Cy gave J.T. a box of candy and put it on the imaginary bill. Cy loved J.T. He even slipped Lacey sleeping powders to sedate him in the bad times. J.T. had staked Cy in pharmacy school and again when he started his store. Cy gave me sodas so J.T. would stay and talk to him. Pop always thought it was Sunday when he was in the drugstore and he’d ask for a paper.