Keeping Secrets (29 page)

She always did that. He didn’t know how she knew, because he never knew himself which night he was going to make the turn and head toward her arms.

“Come on in.” She opened the door wider.

He ducked his head, still a little shy the first few minutes after all these years.

Then she put her round brown arms about him and he felt the familiar pillows of her breasts. How he loved to rest his head there after their lovemaking and take a little nap.

“Honey, I am so happy tonight. I be’s beside myself with joy.”

“Why?” Jake asked from his usual place where he had settled himself in her tiny front room, an antimacassared easy chair.

“’Cause I heard from Viola.”

That was her youngest child, her only girl.

“And she and Brownell be coming to visit from Seattle. And they bringing me my grands.”

Jake nodded, smiled. “That’s good,” he said.

But it always took him aback, even though he could count as well as anyone, to think that Hattie was a grandmother. Though he certainly could be a grandfather, too, if Emma had ever married and settled down. After all, he was almost sixty-six years old.

“And look, I got letters today from both Marcus and James. And pictures too. Almost more in one day than I can stand.” She waved the colored photographs of her two sons in his face.

He took her wrist gently and pulled Hattie to his lap. He snuggled her and rocked her like a child.

“Get away with you,” she laughed. “We be too old for this.”

“Since when? We’re not too old for the other.”

“Hush,” she said and patted him on the cheek. “Leastways
I
be too fat.”

But she couldn’t hide her dimples from Jake. Here she was a woman of fifty-five, and still this man made her feel that way. She had had years of praying about it on Sundays, but then, since her husband had left her so long ago, she thought the Lord understood. Viola hadn’t even been born, was still in her belly, when in the middle of the night her man, overcome by the thought of yet another mouth to feed, had pulled on his clothes, eased out of bed and slipped away out the door. She’d heard him, but what difference would it have made if she’d hollered out his name? Words were no cement when it came to men.

So she’d done what any other colored woman in her situation would do. She left her own with her mother and went to take care of a white woman’s children, washed their diapers, ironed their ruffles, kissed their bumps and bruises, all the time pretending that she was home with Marcus, James and Viola her baby girl.

At the end of the week, she had almost made enough money to feed them. Almost, but not quite. So she was very careful how she spent her money at the corner grocery store.

The first time she noticed that Mr. Fine hadn’t written up everything in the charge book with her name on it, she hadn’t said a thing about it, except to give her thanks to the Lord.

“It’s not the same as stealing, Jesus,” she’d said. “Not the same if the man just made a mistake.”

But it happened again. And yet another time. Then there was the once she’d found, in the bottom of the bag Marcus had brought home, two candy bars.

“You stole!” She stood waving the chocolate right in Marcus’s face.

“No, ma’am,” he said, his face serious as death.

Marcus was her oldest, the one she’d sent away first, as soon as he was big enough, off to her brother in San Jose. He was there still, south of San Francisco, an engineer with Lockheed. He made more money now than she’d ever thought possible for a black man on this earth, and sent her a check every month. After she bought herself a refrigerator, and then a window-unit air- conditioner, she had put the rest of it in the bank. When she was gone, he’d have it for his children’s or their children’s college. He fussed at her, but there was nothing else in the world that her heart could want.

But that day he’d looked at her with those serious eyes and said, “No, ma’am. I never stole nothing in my whole life.”

“You sure you didn’t take them when no one was looking? Was that little girl Emma behind the register, and you just slipped your hand by her into the candy counter?”

“No, ma’am. Mr. Fine was what rung me up,”

He didn’t tell his momma that she was warm. She almost had the story right. Emma
had
been standing right beside her daddy, and it was her hand, with a little silver-and-pearl ring on one finger, that sneaked into the counter and lifted the two Hersheys just as pretty as you please.

Then she’d climbed up on the stool beside her father, who was busy writing in the book, and dropped them into the bag, only then catching Marcus’s eye with a little smile.

She’d whispered the words, no, not whispered, because there was no sound, just mouthed them so clearly that he could have read them even if he’d been deaf.
Thank you.

Thank you, he guessed, for having caught her a few days before, caught her and kept her from slipping on the muddy path and falling into the canal.

But she couldn’t say it out loud. He understood. Even though they hadn’t been playing together, had just happened to be there at the same time, him and James, and Emma and that little white boy Mike.

Emma couldn’t say it out loud, and it was too complicated for Marcus to explain to his momma now. His hand on Emma’s arm, her hand dropping chocolate into his sack, puzzled him, made him feel funny inside, good and bad at the same time. But he didn’t begin to have the words to explain it, not even to himself.

So he just said the words again, “Mr. Fine rung me up.”

After that, Jake’s little gifts to Hattie continued, an extra pound of hamburger meat, a loaf of bread, a couple yards of blue cotton fabric. Emma and Viola had matching dresses in that pattern that their mothers on either side of the canal had run up.

Jake told himself that he was just being kind, but it was more than that. For there was something about Hattie, even though she was colored, that reminded him of Helen—a roundness, a softness, her smile. These things touched a place in him that he thought had died in a row house on Independence Street in Baltimore.

Soon he’d begun to lie in bed beside the snoring Rosalie buttoned up to her chin, thinking lusty thoughts of Hattie. He looked at the space, wide and sharp as a bundling board, between him and his wife and watched the sheet rise between his legs and make a little tent. He would wait all day to see if Hattie would come into the store, but she sent Marcus most days and sometimes James.

Nights, he found himself walking home from the bar out of his way through the Quarters. It took him months of circling through the unpaved dusty streets to get up the courage to approach Hattie’s house.

The colored people had watched him, the old men and women sitting on their front porches dipping snuff. No white people ever walked here except sometimes Cowboy Lou, but, they said deep in their throats, he be’d crazy.

They watched Jake and slipped one another looks out of the corners of their eyes.

“Reckon he be working up his courage.”

“Reckon that ain’t all he be working up soon.”

For white men had
been
in the Quarters before, sliding by in their big long cars, furtive like cockroaches looking for a hiding place in the light. They stopped for just a second while the woman whom they were buying ran to an unlatched car door. Then
zoom
they were gone.

But not Mr. Jake, walking Mr. Jake. ’Course he was different. Couldn’t talk straight, what with that stuttering, and even when he got it out he had that New Yorky way of talking. Folks said he was a Jew. Most of the Quarters wasn’t sure what that meant, but there were those that knew said it was better than being a cracker. Said they’d heard tell the Jews up North were good folk. Treated a Negro like he was a man. So they watched Mr. Jake to see how he was going to play his hand.

He didn’t have to play anything, as it turned out.

When he finally got up the nerve and turned down Hattie’s block as if it were nothing, he had pulled almost even with the corner of her house when she spotted him from behind her screen door.

“Jake,” she called, in that warm low voice. Not Mr. Fine, Mr. Jake. No, none of that. “Jake, come on in,” she said.

He stepped up on her front porch. She opened the door, and he entered as if paying social calls were something he did every day.

“I want to thank you for all your kindness,” she said, then turned her face up to his and kissed him, right in the mouth.

He’d been so shocked, even though this was the stuff his dreams were made of, that he’d fallen back and hit his head against the wall.

“Ha!” she laughed in a laugh that made him wonder whether he’d ever heard anyone laugh before. “Ain’t that what you come for?”

“I…I…” he sputtered. But he didn’t even know what he was trying to say.

“That and a piece of my famous chocolate cake?” She pointed at the oilcloth-covered table, on which sat a prime example of that very thing, taller than Miss Virgie’s had ever been.

It had just gone on from there—for all these years—as if their love affair, because that’s what it was, were the most natural thing. It developed a life of its own. Somehow she always seemed to know when he was coming, would have herself and the sweets he loved ready as if he’d called ahead. In the old days, when the children still lived at home, they’d be safely tucked in or off at her mother’s or a neighbor’s house.

Jake and Hattie had never gone anywhere, not that they could have, even if Jake had been a single man. It would have been hard to hold hands in the picture show with Jake downstairs and Hattie upstairs in the colored balcony. The
White Only
signs that marked even the drinking fountains drew lines in the public world of West Cypress. They never saw each other outside the walls of Hattie’s house. Jake continued to slip her his little gifts. After the store closed for good, she said for him not to worry. She didn’t need them anyway. But Jake continued to bring her small things—cologne, embroidered handkerchiefs, a Whitman’s Sampler of chocolates with a little map on the inside of the box. She liked the jellies and the creams. He liked the caramels and the nuts.

“Honey, we be’s a perfect match,” she’d tease. But she was right.

Tonight he’d brought her a pair of pink nylon panties.

“Lord have mercy, Jake,” she laughed. “What if you die of a heart attack walking here and they find these in your pocket? What’s anybody going to think?”

He laughed, too. Emma would have had a quick answer for her. Emma was good at that. But he wasn’t. He didn’t have the words. He had only his feelings that lived inside.

She knew that. She patted his bald head and smoothed the few strands that wanted to pretend that they belonged on top.

But later, when he left, she lifted the panties from the arm of the easy chair where he’d left them and shook her head. They were panties for a young girl, not for the likes of an old woman like herself whose rear end was spreading into a barrel butt.

Jake knew what her fanny looked like. What could he have been thinking about?

But more and more she’d asked herself that question. He was getting unmindless, as folks said, distracted. He forgot things. And a couple of times recently she’d noticed that he kept peeking at her windows like someone was out there and he wanted her to draw the shades.

Not that she ever flaunted herself for the neighbors. They knew what was what, but there were limits to how far she wanted their noses to grow. So she’d always been careful. She’d always been discreet.

But this was something else. Jake was getting to be afraid of something. For him there was something out there in the darkness. He wouldn’t talk about it when she asked him, but, she shook her head, that was Jake.

12

Los Gatos, California

July 4, 1973

“I wish you had come up to Berkeley and let
me
do this,” said Maria. She was sitting in Emma’s kitchen, watching her chop onions into the coleslaw. “Much as I love your cooking, it’s my turn, you know.”

“I don’t keep track of turns, do you? I love having you-all, and Jesse wanted Clifton to come down and see the windows at Skytop. I do wish you’d stay over; it’ll be dangerous driving home tonight with all the drunks on the road. You know we have plenty of room.”

Maria shook her head and smiled thank you, no. After his years long ago in the Army, Clifton was never comfortable sleeping anywhere but in his own bed.

Emma dumped the onions into a big blue-and-white ceramic bowl and started chopping pickles and peppers.

Maria watched her. “When is Jesse ever going to finish this kitchen?”

“I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“But wasn’t that the first thing he was going to do when you moved in, two—”

“Three and a half years ago. Yes, it was. But you know he puts every living breathing minute into Skytop.”

The kitchen wasn’t awful, it was just inconvenient. The freezer was out on the back porch, and the stove was awkwardly placed. She and Jesse had talked about a six-burner professional range and new shelves. But he’d never gotten around to them.

All the beautiful cabinets Jesse used to build. “The shoemaker’s children,” she said.

“So how’s the Winchester House of the Mountains coming?” The now-dead Sarah Winchester, heir to the rifle fortune, had spent decades and millions building a house in San Jose with secret passageways and numberless rooms.