One More River (9 page)

He removed the several dozen sheets of folded tissue paper, those sheets that mapped his adolescent dreams of buried legacy, with reverence. He carried them to his bed as a priest does sacraments, in the flat of his two hands joined together to make a plate. He tipped them, and the papers slid onto the bedclothes. He sat down, took a deep breath, and opened them one by one with the great care their age required. Once they were spread around him, he took letters from Mama’s box of roses and placed them in the middle. Since there was no one else around, he allowed tears to form behind his lids and trickle down his cheeks. Daddy, he whispered, Daddy. Where are you? Who are you? And then he began to read.

T
HE SINGLE MOST HELPFUL PIECE
of information Mickey Moe did not yet know, could never know from perusal of that dusty heap spread over his comforter, was that in the old days, the days when his daddy was young, there were two Bernard Levys in Tennessee. It’s possible there were more than two, although it can reasonably be assumed there were only two of the same approximate age in Shelby County. Levy is a common name among Jews. There’s a whole tribe of them. Some of these came to the South in the eighteenth century, more in the nineteenth, and twice that in the twentieth. They were from everywhere, most notably from Germany, Holland, Paris, and New York. One of the two Bernard Levys was of an old Memphian family, originally Dutch, wealthy purveyors of agricultural supply. The other Bernard Levy, Mickey Moe’s daddy, was of less fortunate stock. Bad luck dogged his people in Spain, France, Italy, and Manhattan before they swung south on a bone-headed whim just before the War of 1812 broke out, only to find bad luck barked at their heels there, too. Generations before, these Levys had been respected artisans, fashioning chairs, chests, tables, and beds with mythic creatures for feet and finials out of the hard woods of Europe. By the time Mickey Moe’s granddaddy bore the name Levy, the blood was not so much thinned as completely wore out. That man could not give a good grip to a dowel, preferring as he did the sweet caress of waxed playing cards against his soft, uncallused skin.

Gamblers, con men, and actors—that’s what Mickey Moe’s immediate forebears were, the kind of gossamer-winged parasites the Delta hosted with a shrug of her verdant shoulder. They fed off the river and mined it for fools. They had good years and lean ones, traversing the same parcels of land their peddler granddaddies did. Just as the ancestors stopped along the way to set up shop and try their hands at settling down until war or drought or depression uprooted them again, these boys stopped long enough to marry and father children until they ran out of hard cash or fools, then drifted downriver once more, looking for an angle or a game, often finding a knife, a bullet, maybe a fever or snakebite instead. In any case, most times they never did return.

Mickey Moe’s grandmama was of more steady stock. Her people peddled odds and ends of bent silver, cracked porcelain, and snippets of lace scavenged from the refuse of Yankee factories and impoverished estates, carried down country on the backs of cousins then sold door-to-door to Negro families planning a wedding or ’croppers looking to beautify their homes on the cheap. Generations passed. They settled on the outskirts of Memphis, opening up a notions shop with housewares sold under the spurious label
ANTIQUES
. They weren’t rich. But they did alright.

When Caroline Stern met Harvey Levy she knew what he was straightaway. He’d come into her daddy’s establishment looking for a linen handkerchief to replace the tattered thing flaring out of his waistcoat pocket. She knew in the time it took to catch her breath that he was a trickster from the tips of his spectator shoes to the crown of his dove gray fedora, a fly-by-night, a gentleman of no repute at all. But he was very handsome, lithely built with mounds of wavy chestnut hair, bright black eyes, and eyelashes as thick, long, and curly as her own. At the sight of him, her heart beat so hard against her chest she feared her buttons might pop. Harvé, as he called himself, accenting the name in the French manner and passing himself off as a native of New Orleans, was not one to pass by a pretty heaving bosom on which to lay his head for however long it pleased him. He saw her interest and all but twirled his mustache.

Poor Harvé. A week’s dalliance, a mere seven days in—where the hell was he? Podunk, Tennessee?—was all he anticipated, all he planned for on that fateful day of lustful inspiration. He should have remembered the Bible training of his youth, spotty as it was. Six days was all it took the Lord God to invent man, woman, beast, and the Mississippi, along with the entire planet, the stars in their heavens, and whatever lay beyond. For Caroline Stern, ensnaring Harvey Levy required two days and a half.

The woman was a prodigy of love, that was the thing. Once she made her mind up, there wasn’t a man alive who stood a chance. She’d been watching men, studying them, from the time she was six and her daddy installed her on a stool behind the counter to count out change for the customers. By the time Harvé wandered in thirteen years later, she’d witnessed the gender in every state imaginable and recorded in her mind what made them whatever they happened to be. For example, she’d seen men old and young, black and white gripped in the fierce and angry despair that comes when the woman they want does not want them. For the flyspeck of hope a faded silk posy or a cut-glass bottle filled with the perfumed water Mama brewed in the back might give them, they’d pay twice or even three times what the thing was worth without blinking an eye. Once their hands were on it, their palms would sweat or their skin blanch or their eyelids flutter like a girl’s. Then they’d bound out the door leaving a wake of sweet hope in place of the sour scent of desire denied. A few months later, the object of their passion might stroll in alone, clutching a bruised arm and looking through Mama’s medicinal shelf for the greenish powder that covered up a black eye or holding a protective hand over her belly, searching for the whitish liquid that helped with morning sickness. From such observations, she learned the lust of a man dwelt on a knife’s edge, a knife that could cut a man’s pride to slivers or excise his lust overnight to be replaced by loathing or neglect.

She figured there were two ways to catch a man. One was to deny him, wrap him in a shroud of ice, and the other was to yield to him with a passion he could not match. The first day, Harvé flattered her into a cozy spot by the river, she went for ice princess, and that worked pretty well. The second day, she tired of acting like something she was not and allowed her true nature, a cross between Bathsheba and Jezebel, to surface. Harvé, who’d expected to make a woman out of a child that day, was jolted to the core that a virgin—he had that part right at least—could behave in such a depraved, insatiable manner. He was a slave to Caroline Stern’s appetites for the rest of his natural life.

A month later, they stood under a canopy together and took their oaths according to the laws of Abraham. It would have been sooner, but Caroline had to convince her parents their marriage was a good idea. They only accepted Harvé after he gave them his purse with every dollar he had to his name as a bride’s price and signed a document stating he would work as their purveyor of dry goods for the ensuing seven years in return for two rooms at the back of the store where the young couple could make their home. Although the idea of buying a wife had already gone out of fashion, there were plenty of folk around who clung to the tradition so that neither Harvé nor Caroline felt abused by the arrangement. They felt lucky.

What a great and wonderful beginning it was! The two were mad for each other. They felt they had fallen into a honey pot, and they laughed in each other’s arms as often as they moaned. After customers complained the store was locked up in the middle of the day or they’d heard such groans from within they’d been frightened to enter, Mama and Daddy Stern had to speak to them about the indecent hours they chose to celebrate their union. Then Bernard was born, and all of that more or less stopped.

It wasn’t that they’d stopped loving and wanting each other. Bernard had the colic, and there was no peace for a few months. By the time it was over, Harvé had come to grasp the idea of paternal responsibility. Nuptial contract or not, he decided the only way he was to provide his family with security was to take to the river again and win his fortune. He was gone four months his first trip, but he wrote letters and returned with enough silver and gold coin to buy a little house for his wife and child independent of his in-law’s establishment. He stayed around half a year and was gone again, this time for nine months. Again he returned with his pockets overflowing, so all was forgiven. This pattern went on for a handful of years until one day, true to his blood, he went downriver and didn’t return. No one knew what happened to him, but all assumed he was dead. Harvé Levy was too much the family man for any other explanation.

Caroline Stern Levy was forever changed. According to religious law, she was an abandoned wife because she could not produce a corpse to prove otherwise. She was unable to remarry without the verifying signatures of a hundred rabbis when she only knew of two, one in Memphis and the other downriver in Greenville. She could hardly drag her young son around high country looking for ninety-eight more. Yet Caroline Stern Levy was a woman of deep natural longings and in the prime of feminine life when such longings become a gaping need. She took lovers in remedy, although never anyone particular for very long out of respect for Harvé’s memory. Not only did Bernard grow up funny looking and fatherless, but his grieving mother took her comfort in drops of opium and transitory assignations with men eager to accept such limitations, that is, men of low quality. They were the kind of men who thought nothing of making Bernard their errand boy or giving him a gratuitous slap or boot to help him grow right. The only thing that grew in him was a hunger for escape.

When the boy first became aware there was another Bernard Levy around, a Bernard Levy as handsome as he was homely, as rich as he was poor, as loved and cherished by his mama as he was neglected, he was just seven years old. A truant officer arrived at his house and confronted the boy while he sat in the dirt in the front yard, gnawing on a raw beet as it was all he could find to eat and he was hungry. Where’s your mama? the man asked. Bernard dutifully pointed him in the right direction, thinking this natty man in his trim black suit and polished walking boots did not look at all like one of Mama’s usual boyfriends.

The man entered the house and Bernard followed behind. Miz Levy, he said, loudly. I am here for the boy. When Mama didn’t stir from the chair where she sat dead to the world from the previous night’s excess, he kicked its legs to wake her. She remained motionless. Calling on Jesus, the man grabbed Bernard by the collar of his shabby shirt and threw him into his Model T, eventually depositing him in a one-room schoolhouse that stunk of river mud and the school’s two-seater next door.

Bernard stood at the front of the class while his twenty-seven classmates, ranging in age from five to thirteen, stared at him wide-eyed. He was barefoot and filthy as the rest of them, his ginger hair a mess of stand-up snarls, his prominent ears red-tipped with shyness, his eyes, nose, and mouth even more scrunched together than usual as he was scared to do other than squint at his surroundings. A tall, wan lady in a polka-dot dress, thick white socks, and sensible shoes stood over him. She had a wooden pointer in her right hand that she slapped against the left’s open palm each time a word came out her big, fleshy lips. What. Is. Your. Name. Boy.

He squinted and said, Bernard.

She asked, And. Your. Surname.

Levy, he said.

Levy? she asked, looking surprised.

Yes, I am Bernard Levy, he said.

Suddenly, all manner of raucous hell broke loose as all the children and even their teacher burst out laughing. Actually, hootin’ and hollerin’ might better describe the bent-over, foot-stomping earthquake of merriment that ensued.

Bernard Levy! Bernard Levy! they shouted between giggles and guffaws. Little girls, young as five, old as thirteen, came up and curtsied in front of him, one after the other, followed by boys who came up and bowed from the waist. All of this was accompanied by a chorus of jeers and catcalls. To a startled, confused Bernard, the reaction at least seemed good humored and he chuckled a little himself. Truly, not since the great unwashed of Paris crowned Quasimodo was there such a festival of welcome to an outcast.

At last, the lady grabbed hold of her better instincts. Drying her eyes, she told the children in a loud voice that enough was enough and they must settle down. When they ignored her, she cracked her pointer hard against her desk, repeating her demand in a near scream. Everyone finally quieted. Poor little Bernard remained in front of the others while they regarded him quietly now like a museum exhibit. They stared at him so intently he blushed and looked down his nose past his round, hard belly to the tips of his bare toes. The teacher, a worn-out, prickly woman named Miss Maple, took pity on him. She placed a hand on his back and guided him to a seat on a long bench that accommodated the backsides of the smallest of her students. She got him a piece of slate and a stick of chalk from the cupboard near the windows, told him to copy the letters of the alphabet that decorated the top of the wall all around like crown molding, and went back to teaching the geography lesson she’d been working on before the truant officer introduced Bernard to their midst.

At the end of the school day, Bernard followed his classmates until he recognized a street, then made his way back to the river house Harvé bought his family before he disappeared. Caroline Levy was just waking from the previous night’s stupor. He told her all about his day, beginning with the truant officer’s arrival at their home and ending with his journey into the world of education. Mama’s eyes filled up as somewhere in her dim soul she contemplated her life’s tragedies and failures. Her eyelids fluttered, she felt the need to justify herself, and although her mouth was exceedingly dry, she said, And what did you learn, son? What did you learn that your dear daddy of blessed memory and I have not been able to teach you? We taught you your letters and your numbers soon as you could talk along with the Bible of our people, which I swear is all a boy needs to know.