Keeping Secrets (18 page)

“Well?” asked Herman.

“It was a chipmunk,” Bernie snorted. “She led me over half the parish and treed a chipmunk.”

“Ha!” Herman crowed. “I told you that dog was stupid.” He stood then, brushed off the seat of his pants. “Let’s head back. Your mother will have supper waiting.”

But as they headed out together, Bernie’s arm around Emma’s shoulder, Herman and Molly trailing behind, Emma turned and saw Herman slip Molly a meal bone. He looked up at her, winked, and waggled a warning finger.

Okay, Herman, she thought, I’ll talk to you about it again. I won’t go home screaming. I’ve held it in all this time. I’ll hold it a little longer.

* * *

Supper was early in the Graubart house, even earlier as the days grew shorter. At the back door Emma could already smell Mary Ann’s pan-fried steaks. On the table were three kinds of vegetables and a bowl of Herman’s cucumbers, sour cream and onions.

“You going to stay?” Mary Ann called from the kitchen. “You know you’re welcome.”

Mary Ann Graubart wasn’t the warmest of women. In some ways she reminded Emma of Rosalie, afraid of things Emma couldn’t see. But she was nice because of Bernie, so Emma was nice to her in return.

“Thanks,” she said.

Herman warned, “Call your mother.”

Emma shot him a look.

“Hello?” Rosalie answered on the fourth ring, her voice filled with alarm. She was always sure that a nighttime call meant Emma was dead on the road.

“I’m not going to be home for supper.”

“We’re having chicken spaghetti.”

“Thanks, no. Bernie and I have some studying to do.”

“Drive—”

“I’ll drive carefully. And I won’t be too late.”

Rosalie sighed and returned to the stove. She knew that neither of the things Emma had just told her was true.

She’d be late, as always, and drive like a house afire to make up for it. As Rosalie poked at the chicken, steam fogged her glasses, hiding her hurt feelings. Jake, reading the paper at the table, slowly devouring every word, didn’t notice. Only when Rosalie placed his full plate before him did he look up.

He blinked then as if he had come inside after sitting out in the dark.

“Emma?”

“At the Graubarts’.”

Jake frowned, lifted the food to his mouth and chewed, but it was tasteless. He never saw Emma anymore. And when she was home, she was behind her closed door, studying. Not that he minded that. But he was afraid that soon he was going to lose her forever. She’d get married and move away. Or she’d go off to graduate school. He knew that if she left West Cypress, she’d never come back.
He
wouldn’t. Maybe she’d go to California; he’d visit her—oh, to stand on the edge of the Pacific again and look at all that blue.

“I said are you finished?” Rosalie was leaning over him, waiting to take his plate. He looked up at the kitchen clock. He couldn’t have been daydreaming more than ten or twelve minutes. Their meals never lasted longer than that.

Ahead of them stretched the long hours of darkness.

“Do you want some more coffee?” Rosalie asked.

“No, thanks.”

Jake moved to an easy chair and picked up a Carter Brown mystery he didn’t think he’d read before. Neither he nor Rosalie would say another word until ten o’clock when Emma came racing in the side door.

Rosalie pulled a bright lamp up to the kitchen table, wiped off the plastic tablecloth, and laid out her sketch pad and her pencils. Propped beside the gooseneck lamp was the first photograph she had ever seen of Emma as a baby, the one Jake had sent her from New York.

The house was filled with Rosalie’s watercolors and pencil sketches. Hers was a small talent, she knew, but when the ladies in her Bible group visited and fussed over her work, she was always pleased.

Sometimes she prettied up other pictures, adding snow to branches, smoke to chimneys. Recently she’d done a watercolor of her old home place that she liked a lot. But her best were her pencil sketches, renderings from photos of her mother, Emma and Jake. Emma was the hardest. She couldn’t get her eyes right or her mouth. Something always eluded her.

But this photograph of Emma when she was a baby with a big toothless grin, this was her favorite. She did it over and over again. She held the photo up now at arm’s length. What a sweet little thing Emma had been—so helpless. All she could do at that age was creep and crow and gurgle. She’d held on to Rosalie’s arm, her hair, her skirttails so tightly, as if Rosalie were the only person in the world. Those had been the best days of Rosalie’s life, before Emma got big enough to let go.

Rosalie glanced over at Jake, still reading. She sighed. This was all he ever did, it seemed, and all he wanted to do when he came home from his job butchering at the supermarket. It was better, in a way, though, since their store had closed. At least he got out of the house a little.

Jake sat turning the pages of a
National Geographic
. He stopped at a story on East Africa. In one of the pictures beautiful bare-breasted black women were pulling little pieces of meat out of a pot. He thought for a minute about the meat he smelled cooking when he walked home from the Ritz Bar through the Quarters, about the low laughter he heard from their porches, the soft voices every once in a while that called, “Hello, Mr. Jake.” And then, as if Rosalie could see that thought and would ask him what on earth he was doing walking those dirt streets of the colored ghetto, he pulled his mind back to the magazine and turned the page. The next story was about Singapore. People were eating there too, nibbling things off little sticks.

Then he closed his eyes and could see himself handing a hot dog to Helen. She loved to eat outdoors. One afternoon he’d taken her to Coney Island, and she’d eaten three Nathan’s franks without stopping and laughed and laughed when he warned that she might get sick.

Helen would have loved Singapore. In his mind he took her hand, and they turned the corner, right there off the page, around that corner where the photograph couldn’t see. They ran down the sidewalk together, but not too far. He slowed her then, and they stopped. She tipped back the brown straw hat she was wearing, grinned, and then she gave him a kiss.

Rosalie paused at the door and looked at Jake leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed. Why, she wondered, was he smiling?

7

San Francisco

1962

Jesse Tree had spent the whole morning at Oakland’s Jack London Station waiting for a train. The day was a brilliant blue, the blue of Van Gogh’s Provence.

Clifton, his art teacher from his childhood days in Watts, was on that train, coming to teach drawing at the university in Berkeley.

“Hell,” Clifton had said to him on the phone. “I reckon if a young twerp like you can find fame and fortune in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, why not me too?”

Things
had
gone well for Jesse Tree, once he had left behind charcoal, acrylic, oils, and had found himself to be a sculptor in wood.

He’d taken the advice of Clifton, who’d warned him that the life of an artist was a tough row to hoe. “’Less you like starving, boy, you better find some way to make your art pay. Fine art’s fine, but so’s eatin’.”

And Jesse had. He’d studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, but he’d learned woodworking, carpentry, furniture making too. He supported himself building cabinets, at first journeyman work, but now he was on his own, carving woodwork for Pacific Heights mansions in cherry, oak, price be damned, ebony wood. He’d begun to make tables and desks on commission for these castle dwellers, and those were indeed works of art, a fact that Jesse had just begun to recognize.

Maybe he wasn’t waiting until he could do his art. Maybe he was doing it now at twenty-four.

In the library he found the work of 1920s furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, discovered that in eighteenth-century France there was no more exalted title than Cabinetmaker to the King. With that inspiration, he stretched, he dared, he soared. He inlaid hundreds of ebony valentines in a hall stand of purple heartwood. He experimented with silver and gold leaf. “Craft furniture,” they called it in his first group exhibition. Now a small gallery out on Sacramento Street had called, to talk about a one-man show.

He’d telephoned Clifton with the news. “Hot damn!” Clifton had exclaimed. “But tell me, boy, have they seen
you
?”

“I sent them an eight-by-ten of Tab Hunter.”

Clifton laughed, but saw in his mind’s eye a young man who almost glowed in the dark. He was a black prince, handsome, big-shouldered, strong-limbed, intelligent—best of breed, one would have called him had he been a horse. Clifton, who loved men but didn’t lust after them, could nonetheless smell Jesse’s sexuality as if it were sprayed around him like a fine perfume. He reeked of sex; it wafted in and out of his pores. But Clifton knew that that kind of attractiveness didn’t exactly make white people comfortable—including gallery owners.

“Just keep your pecker in your pants,” he’d said to Jesse. “You ain’t no white starlet, gone fuck your way to the top.” Clifton had been telling him the same thing since he was just a boy.

In the distance a whistle blew and behind the whistle there was a chugging, and a whooshing, and then the crackle of an announcement overhead which Jesse couldn’t understand, for a tiny old Chinese man was asking him a question. The man held a squawking parrot in a great gilt-and-enameled cage. From behind the cage peeked a little girl, a granddaughter doll with long black hair. She stood on her tiptoes and whispered into Jesse’s lowered ear, “The time, please, sir, the time?” Jesse smiled, remembering his sisters Clarissa and Allison at that age.

Before he could check his watch and answer, he felt a sudden clap on his back. “You leave that little girl alone!”

Jesse whirled and fell into Clifton’s embrace.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” Clifton shouted, “why didn’t you tell me it takes three days to get from LA?”

“If you’d paid full fare and ridden up front, you’d have been here yesterday.”

“You little bastard,” Clifton laughed at the young man who towered over him now by half a foot. “Never gave me any respect. Nothing ever changes.”

Jesse stood back and looked his friend in the face. No, some things never did. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed Clifton until he saw his face, his stiff-legged gait.

“Say, there room for one more nigger painter in Frisco?” Clifton laughed, his big voice carrying out across the tracks. Several heads turned and stared, but Jesse didn’t care. Hell, he and Clifton were going to turn more heads than that.

Jesse struggled to take Clifton’s battered suitcase from him at the same time the older man slapped him on the back.

“Goddamn, it’s good to see you, boy.” Clifton rubbed his hands together. “So where do we start?”

“Let’s drop your bag off at my place in the city. You can stay with me till we find you something in Berkeley. Or if you want to stay over here where it’s happening, we’ll see if we can talk my landlady Maria into giving you a room. She owns space all over.” Then Jesse winked.

“Maria, huh? You telling me something?”

Jesse shook his head in a gesture of innocence. “Pretty woman, but not for me…maybe for you. She’s just thrown out that fat wop she was married to. Maybe she’s got a taste for something older and darker.”

“Then lead on, my man, lead on.”

Much later they stood side by side in a smoky jazz club on Upper Grant drinking shooters. The bassist was playing his lick, the too-low-to-even-imagine notes that sounded like a joke, like watching a fat man waltz.

“My Uncle Slideman played here a few weeks ago,” said Jesse.

“You see him?”

“Yeah, he’s really bad, man, the cat can blow.”

A blonde cocktail waitress in a short black skirt elbowed her way into the bar.

“Anything I can do for you?” she murmured into Jesse’s ear.

“No—no, thanks, I’m just fine.”

She turned and walked away, then Clifton poked him. “She wanted more than your drink order. Boy, like I always told you, you don’t watch out, you going be the spit and image of your daddy.”

“Clifton, you’re always blowing that same note, singing that same tune.”

“Well, it’s true. Between your looks and the way your daddy raised you, there’s a severe danger you just gone fuck all your talent away. Be nothing more than an old cunthound.”

“My daddy raised me! Hell, Clifton, you know better than that!”

“Yeah, well, and you know what I’m talking about too.”

Jesse did. He paused a long moment. The saxophonist played a spiraling riff as if he were a bird looking for a place to light.

* * *

In Los Angeles, where he’d grown up except for summers with his mother, Blanche, Jesse had no parents other than his paternal grandparents Lucretia and Josephus Tree. He’d felt like a father himself to his sisters Clarissa and Allison, trying to stop them from following in Blanche’s wild path, bouncing pebbles to her rolling stone. Only from time to time did his father Jessup, put in an occasional appearance.

“Hello, boy,” he would say, that handsome man of whom Jesse was indeed the echo. He was slow and somber when he came to Lucretia’s house, knocking at the front door like an acquaintance making an obligatory social call. Gravely, he always offered Jesse his hand but nothing more except that once, on the fifteenth anniversary of his only son’s birth.