Temple of My Familiar (52 page)

The two of them are so clean they shine, and their small area, with its two twin beds, two nightstands, and two chairs, is as neat as a pin. Mr. Hal’s bed is adjusted so that he is sitting up, and Miss Rose sits in a chair next to him. She is crocheting. Suwelo has seen Miss Rose only a few times before, when she came by Uncle Rafe’s house to bring him food. Then, she was always with Miss Lissie.

She is old and looks something like a dumpling or a really wizened apple, with small sunken eyes and thin white hair. She finally notices Suwelo’s presence and slowly pushes herself up from her chair with a soft cry. How odd it feels now to Suwelo that he has eaten so much of her food and yet knows so little about her.

He moves forward, smiling, into their space. He has brought a plant, which Miss Rose, admiring it with squinty, nearsighted eyes, places on the nightstand. Suwelo hugs her, feeling the insubstantial flesh, the soft bones, the severe curvature in her spine that makes her short and stooped. But what an energetic hug she still manages. He feels quite squeezed.

Next he turns to the bed where Mr. Hal lies smiling, with what appears to be the blissful patience of the blind. Suwelo sits on the bed and leans toward him gingerly; moving very slowly and carefully indeed, he envelops Mr. Hal in his arms.

“We had to marry!” says Miss Rose, serving Suwelo tea. “At our age!”

“But why?” asks Suwelo.

“That was the only way we could live in the home together.”

“They don’t want folks living here in sin,” says Mr. Hal, sarcastically.

“Hal had to come here first, you know,” says Miss Rose, who has pulled a chair for herself right next to Suwelo’s so that they both face Mr. Hal’s bed. “Among all the other things that weren’t working too good, his eyes had just give out.”

“That’s the truth,” says Mr. Hal. “I stopped painting after Lissie died. I just couldn’t do it. Next thing I knew, it looked like a curtain had dropped.”

“I started coming to see about him,” says Miss Rose, as Suwelo sips his tea. “Brought him tasty things to snack on. We’d sit here and keep each other company. Talk about the weather; talk about the white folks and their destructiveness, black folks and their foolishness. Talked, all the time, about Lissie. We sure do miss her.”

“They were friends for—what was it Rosie?—sixty years.”

“No, not quite that long,” says Miss Rose. “But long enough. I knew she’d want me to look after you.”

“Now wait a minute,” says Mr. Hal, with much of his charm still intact, “you don’t want Suwelo to think that’s the only thing.”

Miss Rose blushes. She definitely does. Suwelo puts down his empty cup and scratches his chin.
Hummm
, he thinks. Miss Rose excuses herself and goes off to visit a friend farther down the hall. She understands that Suwelo and Mr. Hal want to talk.

“Thanks again for sending me the cassettes Miss Lissie left for me,” says Suwelo. “And for the slides of the work she did before she died.”

“Oh, it was all so puzzling,” says Mr. Hal, “those last things she did. I couldn’t make heads nor tails out of any of it. That big tree with all the black people and funny-looking critters, and snakes and everything ... and even a white fellow in it. Then all those lions ...”

Mr. Hal stops to catch his breath.

“Mr. Hal,” says Suwelo softly, “in those last paintings, Miss Lissie painted herself.”

“Sure she did,” Mr. Hal says, almost laughing. “You forget how many changes I’ve seen Lissie go through. But I didn’t see a sign of her in any of those last paintings.” He pauses. “There’s not even a sprig of verbena or a stalk of corn from our yard... .” He is almost bitter. It is as if he feels, in her very last paintings, that Miss Lissie went off without him. Left him there alone in the little morning-glory-covered house even before she died. Something she’d never done before. Mr. Hal is very mad at her.

“I couldn’t recognize anything in them,” he says flatly.

At that moment, Suwelo realizes one of the reasons he was born; one of his functions in assisting Creation in this life. He also realizes he will need a higher authority than his own to convince Mr. Hal of anything to do with Miss Lissie. Mr. Hal’s heart is hurt, and his mind, consequently, is closed.

Out of his pocket, Suwelo takes the small cassette player that he carries with him now whenever he is likely to encounter elderly people. Miss Lissie’s tape is already in it. All he has to do is place the earphones over Mr. Hal’s ears and turn the machine on.

At first Mr. Hal is apprehensive and seems bothered by the wires. Suwelo adjusts everything, more than once, until Mr. Hal is comfortable. Mr. Hal also calms down when he hears Miss Lissie’s voice.

They sit, the middle-aged man and the very old man, sometimes looking into each other’s faces, sometimes not, as the tape spins. Suwelo is intensely conscious of the sunlight now coming through the window above the bed and the way it falls, like a blessing, on the little green plant he brought. He gets up, goes down the hall, and brings back a cup of water, which he pours over the plant. He stands and watches as the water soaks into the soil. “Say ‘ahhhh,’” he whispers to the little plant. And he imagines it does so.

After half an hour, and after he’s turned over the tape for Mr. Hal, Suwelo hears the
schlop, schlop
of old and hesitant feet coming down the room between the double rows of beds. A few minutes later, old Mr. Pete, whom he had seen on the front porch, is craning his hairy red neck into Mr. Hal’s cubicle. “Whar’s Hal?” he asks in a braying, panic-stricken voice. He is looking right at Hal, but because Mr. Hal is absorbed in listening to the tape and, furthermore, has his eyes closed, the old man can’t see him. At least this is how it appears to Suwelo, who is amused.

Miss Rose comes up out of nowhere and hustles Mr. Pete away. Suwelo gets up from his chair and tiptoes down the walkway after them. Mr. Pete is one of those old tall, blue-eyed, rawboned white men who look as though they’ve lived long lives of perfect crime. He is leaning heavily on Miss Rose’s shoulder, and she is chattering away at him. “Hal’s busy right now,” she says.

“What you say?” says old Pete.

“He’s got company!” she shouts up at his ear.

“What’s he got?” he says. “Not got a cold, is he?”

“No,” she yells, “
company.
”

“What’s he got?”

Miss Rose says, “Got a Co’Cola that he told me to give to you. Here”—she hands him a Coke from the machine in front of them—“have a cold drink.”

Suwelo laughs and laughs. He thinks, Well, what do you know, there’s life, even in nursing homes!

When he gets back to Mr. Hal’s bed, after walking all over the nursing home and seeing more of its life, he finds Mr. Hal in tears.

“Oh,” he moans, when Suwelo sits next to him on the bed. “She loved Rafe so much better than me!”

Suwelo takes one of his old smooth hands in his own. He is tempted to kiss it. What the hell, he thinks. What does it mean to be a man if you can’t kiss when you want to? He lifts Mr. Hal’s hand to his lips and kisses it, as he would kiss the mashed finger of a child.

“She loved you very much,” he says. “It’s you she’ll be coming back to.”

“Who am I kidding?” says Mr. Hal. “It’s my own fault Lissie couldn’t love me more. Rafe let her be everything she was. I couldn’t do that.”

“But how were you to know all that she was?” says Suwelo, comfortingly. “She never told you, did she?”

“People don’t have to tell you every little thing,” he says. “Making them tell you every little thing is brutal.”

“Well,” says Suwelo, pressing his hand, “she did try to tell you at the end.”

“Yes,” says Mr. Hal. “She did.” He begins to cry afresh. “And do you know what I did?” he asks. “I ridiculed what she’d done. I laughed. I looked at the little white fellow in the tree and I said, ‘Looks like you forgot to paint that one.’ And Lissie just looked at me and said, ‘No. That’s his color.’ But she looked so sad. And would I ask her what was the matter? No.”

Mr. Hal blew his nose in a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand.

“And I was even worse about the lions. I told her that just the thought of a cat that big gave me the creeps.”

He pauses, wondering.

“But when I said that, she just laughed. You know how Lissie could sometimes laugh. It made you feel like a perfect idiot, but because she seemed so merry you had no idea why.

“And to think ...” Mr. Hal choked. “And here I am, out here at the home, and being out here I’ve had to learn so much. Why,” he says, sitting up taller and straining his neck, as if he’s listening for something, “my best friend is an old cracker named Pete. He ought to be shuffling over this way any minute now. We sometimes have our meals together.”

Suwelo tells him Pete has been there and gone.

“He was a jerk all his life, you know,” says Mr. Hal. “Only the lord and his ledger keeper know how much misery he’s caused. But he’s here now, and he’s scared. And he’s deaf, and he’s old.”

“He’s funny, too,” says Suwelo.

“The heart just goes out to the man,” says Mr. Hal. “Besides, I can’t see him.”

“Oh,” says Suwelo, “he’s white, all right. You couldn’t mistake it.”

“I’m still afraid of cats, though.” Mr. Hal sighs. “But I’m willing to work on it.”

Suwelo looks at the paintings on the wall. Mr. Hal says he may take any or all of them. There are a dozen more stacked along the floor. Among those on the floor he finds Miss Lissie’s last two paintings. The one of what he has come to think of as the tree of life, with everything, including “the little white fellow” in its branches, and the last one in a series of five that she did of lions.

He sits on the edge of Mr. Hal’s bed and studies these two paintings. They are lush and clear and dreamlike and beautiful, and remind him of Rousseau.

“I could always see Lissie,” Mr. Hal says fussily, with stubborn propriety, reaching over to take one of the paintings Suwelo holds.

Suwelo muses, guiding a painting into Mr. Hal’s hand. Was it Freud who said we can’t see what we don’t want to see? He watches Mr. Hal strain his eyes as if they are muscles, as he tries to see the painting in his hand. It is the tree-of-life one. Groaning from frustration, he soon throws it down in despair.

Suwelo, however, begins to feel hope. And he thrusts the other painting, of the great maned lion, into Mr. Hal’s hands. He does not notice he has handed it to him upside down.

“Humm ...” says Mr. Hal, after a few minutes, “what’s that reddish spot up in the corner?”

Mr. Hal is shifting the painting back and forth in front of his eyes, trying to get the reddish spot into the light that comes from the window over his head.

Suwelo sits very still, as one ought to do in the presence of miracles.

But apparently the reddish spot is all that Mr. Hal can see. This painting, too, is flung to the bed with a frown.

Suwelo takes up the painting, which he loves, turns it right side up, and looks straight into Miss Lissie’s dare-to-be-everything lion eyes. He knows, and she knows, that Mr. Hal will be able to see all of her someday, and so she and Suwelo must simply wait, and in the meantime—if this is one of the paintings Suwelo takes home with him—she and he can while away the time contemplating the “reddish spot,” which marks the return of Mr. Hal’s lost vision. For on Lissie’s left back paw, nearly obscured by her tawny, luxuriant tail, is a very gay, elegant, and shiny red high-heeled slipper.

Acknowledgments

For their cheerful support and independent attitudes during the writing of this novel, I thank my daughter, Rebecca Walker, and our friend Robert Allen. For editing this book with gracefulness and skill, I thank John Ferrone. For being a first reader—along with Rebecca and Robert—I thank Gloria Steinem. For their sensitive criticism of the manuscript, I thank Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal. For the inspiring example of her personal chutzpah and her unflappable calm in pursuit of our common interests, I thank my agent, Wendy Weil. I thank Ester Hernandez for correcting my Spanish.

I thank the Universe for my participation in Existence. It is a pleasure to have always been present.

A Biography of Alice Walker

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel
The Color Purple
, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.

Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.

Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book,
Once
(1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.