The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (18 page)

“Now I’m saying otherwise.”

“But Hattie … you have to be practical. There’s clothes and food to consider, and all of you squeezed into this little house. I know it must be hard, but it’s the best thing. For Ella.”

“You don’t know anything about it. You’ve never had a child, so you can’t say how hard it might be. Can you, Pearl?”

Pearl began to weep. Hattie stood in front of her rocking Ella. She was sorry to see Pearl cry. She was sorry for her loneliness. Benny looked at his wife like she was a stranger to him, like she was somebody who’d wandered in off the street. But, Hattie thought, her problems aren’t mine to fix. She wanted them to leave. She wanted some quiet, an hour of silence before the other children came home from school.

“There’s not much point in going on with this,” Hattie said.

A whistled tune drifted in from the other side of the door. The knob turned. August stepped in.

“Y’all already here?” he said. He saw Pearl crying and Benny staring at his shoes and Marion sitting there looking like somebody’s old aunt. And Hattie, Hattie like a thundercloud in the middle of the room.

“I guess things ain’t going so well. I didn’t reckon they would,” he said.

“Please, August, say something to her. She says she won’t give up Ella, but we had an agreement. You know we did.” Pearl said.

“Nothing I can say. She thinks I’m lower than a cockroach. You know what though? Don’t nobody ever act like this child is one bit mine. Y’all act like she hatched from an egg. Don’t nobody never think maybe it hurts me to see her go.”

“Please, August,” Pearl said. “We agreed. We all agreed!”

“This our child, Pearl. You got no right to act like you better than us. A blind man can see that’s what you think, and that don’t endear you to nobody. You all come from the same parents. Things took a different turn for Hattie, but you strutting around like a cock in the yard ain’t right and it ain’t true.”

Hattie looked over at August, surprised to find an ally in him, hesitant to believe he really was one.

“I halfway hoped y’all’d already be gone when I came home ’cause I didn’t want to see another one of my children taken way.”

“She’s not going to be taken away,” Hattie said. “I changed my mind.”

August nodded. “I was of half a mind to call Pearl myself and tell her not to come. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing a child again. I thought it would put me in the floor, but then I realized it ain’t the same thing as before.”

“Where are you going with this, August?” Hattie asked.

“I need to tell you this, Hattie, even though you won’t want to hear it. You watched our two babies go, you nursed them, and sang to them and rocked them, and it didn’t do no good in the end.”

August’s voice cracked.

“I won’t stand here and tell you what you should do but I want you to know that this ain’t that. Ella ain’t suffering and she ain’t dying. We had that pain, Hattie, and we’ll have this too, but you got to understand it ain’t the same thing.”

Hattie looked at August a long while. She nodded and he nodded back. No one spoke. Pearl stood and took a step toward Benny, but he was sitting with his head in his hands and did not look at her. He won’t love Ella, she realized. She had fooled herself into thinking that he would. “Oh!” she said aloud and sank down onto the couch.

Hattie cupped Ella’s head in her hand; her hair tickled her palm. She touched her fingers to the baby’s plump calves and dimpled knees and small translucent toenails. After a time, August took Ella in his arms and sang to her so quietly she fell asleep. Hattie watched him nuzzle her and remembered his smile when she told him she was pregnant. She remembered her panic and her rage. She had nearly gone to Willie for something to get rid of the pregnancy. And certainly Hattie was glad she hadn’t done that—here was her baby girl in the world. Hattie was grateful for Ella’s life, however briefly she’d had a place in it. But then there was this unbearable fact: Hattie was losing another of her children. And she couldn’t help but ask herself, God help her, if it wouldn’t have been easier if Ella hadn’t ever existed, and Hattie had never had these six months as her mother. How was she supposed to bear a life like this? She looked around the room as if she might find the answer in August’s face or Marion’s or Pearl’s, but her eyes settled on her daughter. In that moment it was no consolation to think she was doing the right thing for her child. Best not to think at all, best to move, because if she didn’t, she would fall down and she wouldn’t get up again. Hattie stood and climbed the stairs. She came down a few minutes later with Ella’s Moses basket and a brown bag.

“Here’s some of her things,” she said to Pearl. “There’s a doll baby in there that I made for her. I’m sure you have something fancier, but she likes this one and it smells like me, so you can give it to her on the ride back if she fusses.”

Pearl looked at her sister as though she wanted to say something but didn’t know what it ought to be.

Hattie took Ella from August’s arms. She’ll sleep all the way to Georgia, she thought. The baby snuffled and whimpered, so Hattie shifted her onto her shoulder and rubbed her back.

“She fidgets in her sleep,” she said to Pearl. “You have to pick her up and rub her back like this or she’ll wake up howling.”

She’s only my child for a few more minutes, Hattie thought. She wished Ella would wake up so she could see her eyes one last time.

“You ought to go now before she wakes up,” Hattie said.

She handed her to Pearl. I’m in the floor, she thought.

Marion and Benny, Hattie and August, and Pearl, holding Ella, walked out to the street. Benny opened the car door and settled Pearl and Ella in the back. He pulled off slowly. Pearl raised her hand in a wave and held it suspended until the car rounded the corner and was gone.

“The children will be home from school soon,” Hattie said.

“I guess they will be,” August replied.

They went into the house and began carrying the baskets of food into the kitchen. The butterflies were still alive in the Mason jar. August turned to her and said, “We gon’ make it through, Hattie.”

She snatched the jar from the table and hurled it at the wall behind August. The two of them watched the butterflies, stunned and struggling in the broken glass.

Alice and Billups

1968

6:30 A.M.

A
LICE STOOD IN
her bathrobe at the top of the staircase. The sun had not yet risen. Outside, she heard the muffled thump of car doors in the driveway, Royce getting into the town car that took him to his office, his driver shutting the door behind him, then the fading engine rev as the car pulled into the street and was gone. The grandfather clock tolled the half hour, and the wooden stairs creaked with cold. Eudine would not come until nine. This morning of all mornings it seemed to Alice unjust that she should have to descend alone into the house to light the furnace and put the kettle to boil. Eudine ought to have been there already, neatly uniformed, pouring the coffee and doing the toast while Alice gave her instructions for the party that evening. The guests would not arrive until nine—a lifetime away—but there were the caterers to keep after, the good china to be gotten out of the credenza, the liquor to be delivered.

Alice went down. In the foyer she bent to straighten the corner of the throw rug that Royce had kicked up as he left the house. He never failed to kick up the rug, as he never bothered about turning on the lights or the heat. But of course, she was lucky to have him, there were so few colored doctors, and from such a prominent family. She walked through the chill rooms of the first floor. Well, what did Royce know of
love’s austere and lonely offices
? A couple of years before, he insisted they attend a reading of Robert Hayden’s poetry, and when Hayden recited that line, Royce nodded with great feeling. But later, when Alice mentioned the poem, Royce didn’t remember it at all and he had looked at her with pity as if to say silly, unsophisticated Alice, starry eyed over a trifle. The point, she realized too late, was to go to the reading with the other colored elites of the city, not to remember the poems. She still made so many errors in conduct, even after five years of marriage.

Alice turned up the thermostat and sat in the kitchen waiting for the whoosh of the pilot and the gurgle in the radiators. Barely past seven! She did not like to admit she was lonely, though she listened for the click of Eudine’s key in the front door. If only her brother Billups were there with her. Alice missed him most in the early morning. How many times had he arrived at seven, bleary eyed after hours of nightmares? They would sit at the kitchen table drinking tea until he had calmed, then he would kiss her on the cheek and thank her and go off to whatever little part-time job he had. In the last few months his visits had dwindled to once every two weeks. He hadn’t even called her back about the party. Even Mother had phoned to say she’d come, Mother who never phoned, who did not like parties, who did not, Alice sometimes thought, like Alice.

Hattie’s house was only thirty minutes’ walk, but Alice never went there now. When she did see her parents and siblings, they had to come to her, sit at Alice’s table and be served by her help. They were all coming for the party. They’d eye her lovely things, sit on her settees and sofas, and chat with her as though she had never been one of them. Bell would walk out of the powder room and make a joke about how she could sell the hand towels to pay the month’s rent. Of course, the trouble was their jealousy. Though it was also true that, when assembled, the family put her in mind of a group of roaming, solitary creatures rounded up and caged together like captured leopards. It would help that Floyd’s concert occasioned the party. He had been away for fifteen years, since Alice was a girl of ten. She only knew what he looked like from his pictures in the paper. Mother cut out articles about him and sent the clips to everyone in the family. Who would have suspected Hattie of sentiment? Oh! How the prospect of their coming terrified her. Alice stood so abruptly she nearly upset her chair. Five minutes later she was out on the street, her panic burning away in the frigid air.

7:30 A.M.

Alice had been walking for thirty minutes when Saint Mark’s Lutheran Church came into view. She needed a few minutes’ warmth. The cold morning, so calming when Alice left the house, had turned brutal. The church loomed over the block, three stories with a steep flight of granite steps that led to red double doors. Royce’s family had been members there for seventy years. The family name was inscribed on a plaque on a pew at the front, the same pew in which Alice sat every Sunday with the brim of her mother-in-law’s hat poking into the side of her face.

When Alice and Billups were teenagers, they went often to Catholic churches. They’d skip school and skulk around parks smoking cigarettes, then catch the trolley to Our Mother of Consolation or Old Saint Mary’s or Holy Trinity. They took turns in the confession booth telling their secret to the clergyman on the other side of the wooden lattice. Alice told the story in a flat little voice, reciting the facts as though she were reading a grocery list. She told it so often she was immune to its effects on her listener, and if the priest gasped or paused in shock, she was almost surprised. On the way out she and Billups lit candles for the preservation of their souls. More often, they did the reverse: they whispered a name, always the same name, and blew out a candle to extinguish his soul. Well, now Alice and Billups were grown up and they both knew there wasn’t any way to rid the world of malignant souls.

The icy landing at the top of St. Mark’s steps had already been salted. An older man came out of the church holding a white bucket. Alice did not recognize him for a few seconds, bundled in a coat and scarf as he was. But then she noticed the slope of his shoulders and the way he held his neck at a forward angle, as though he were peering at something in the distance. Alice gasped. She couldn’t see his face, but it was surely him—he wore that same fedora, had that same rodent skittishness.

“Thomas!” Alice tried to call out, but her mouth only opened and closed like a fish mouth. Each time she encountered him she had the same vision: she beat him with her fists and scratched him bloody with her fingernails, kneed him in the groin until he fell onto the sidewalk. But she was too afraid to even point at him, much less attack. He descended steadily toward her, throwing fistfuls of salt on the stairs. She would hold her ground this time, at least that, and when he reached her, he would have to look into her face and acknowledge her. He drew closer, his heels clicking on the stairs.

Alice had never met another man who wore such noisy shoes. How the sound had echoed in his empty house when she was a child. He had so little furniture: the stand-up chalkboard in the kitchen and the square table where he went over Alice and Billups’s lessons, the loveseat in the little parlor where Alice waited with her school workbook pressed open on her knees. The latch would click softly as he closed the parlor door behind him and again as he locked her inside. He’d pause on the other side of the door and jiggle the handle to make sure Alice could not get out. She was alone in the little room. The house filled with the sounds of his shoes tapping against the tiles in the foyer. Then the clack of his heels against the wooden floors in the small dining room. Then nothing as he walked on the rectangle of carpet in the hallway that led to the kitchen.

Alice looked up at him on the steps. He was not far from her now. Wait, she thought. Hold on. He’s almost here—he’s nearly scratching distance. But as he grew closer, the air around them seemed to contract and push her toward him until it was as though they were side by side, and she could smell his chalk and shoe leather scent. She turned and fled.

8:30 A.M.

“Billy! Billy are you there?” Alice called. She rang his bell a fourth time. “Billy!” There were only three units in the apartment house; Alice pressed all of the buzzers. A woman she had never seen before opened a second-floor window and stuck her head out.

“Miss! Stop that carrying on! He must not be here. Lord Jesus!”

Alice pulled her coat more tightly around her. “Billy!” she called again. Her toes ached with cold. She was wearing a pair of tennis shoes with soles thin as crackers. But she was determined to warn Billups that Thomas was not far from the neighborhood. Alice scanned the street to see if he’d followed her from the church. “Billy!” she shouted.

The neighbor woman opened her window again, “I told you he’s not here!” “Couldn’t you please knock on his door? Apartment three?”

“Miss, I’m trying to get some sleep! I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Was he all right?” He was so fragile, with his insomnia and his headaches.

“I have half a mind to call the police if you don’t get out of here.”

“But I’m his sister!”

The woman shut her window. Alice descended the steps and stood in the middle of the sidewalk. She glanced one last time at Billups’s window. The curtain moved. Or was it the play of the tree branches’ reflection in the glass panes?

“Billy?” she called, more quietly this time. Alice’s eyes welled with tears. She looked down the empty street and felt a sudden foreboding. It was as though the iron sky and the aching cold and the minutes hurtling past—here it was already 8:30, already February, already her twenty-fifth year!—bore her some ill will. Alice shivered and turned toward home. Surely it was the strangeness of the morning that made her feel so unprotected.

9:30 A.M.

A white van pulled out of the driveway as Alice crossed the lawn to her front door.

“Who was that?” Alice called as she walked into the house. “Eudine?”

Eudine padded into the foyer like a great cat, all long strides and silence. She was neat as a pin, her hair twisted into a chignon at the base of her neck, her apron sun-blind white, and her face, not just her skin, but her expression, as smooth as melted caramel. Alice pulled her coat more tightly around her, as if she could hide her dungarees and canvas shoes dirtied with melting slush. She pushed a mussed lock of hair back under her wool cap.

“Who was that in the van?” Alice asked again.

“Caterer.”

“The what? The caterer? They’re not scheduled until the afternoon.”

“I couldn’t say,” Eudine replied.

She could say, of course. Eudine knew everything about the running of the house. She was the most efficient person Alice had ever known—always fifteen minutes early to work and up at five every morning.

“Well, they made a mistake, didn’t they?” Alice said. “I don’t know why you didn’t send them away.”

Eudine did not reply. She was indecipherable, so ageless and immaculate. Her eyes were the same caramel shade as her skin. Her face was a placid lake, such depths. A woman with a face like that could be a confessor, could be told anything, no matter how awful, and remain steady as granite. When she hired her, Alice had hoped Eudine might become her confidant, like in those films in which the lady of the house sits at her vanity telling her secrets to a maid who unclasps her necklaces and lays them in the jewelry box. Or was it was only white women who made confidants of their servants? Or only white women with whom colored maids would be forced into confidence? Maybe Alice was only an imitation of a rich white woman in a big house. She was not entirely certain what she was imitating. That is to say, the object of her efforts was nearly always unclear.

“I’ll just call them.” Alice kept her papers for the party on a desk in the sitting room. Weeks of lists: linens needed, menus, the phone numbers for the florists and agency that sent extra help, and the catering captain whom Alice had dismissed. The woman had lorded about as if it were she who was the lady of the house. Why, she had stopped consulting Alice at a certain point, in the interest of expedience, she’d said. As if Alice couldn’t plan her own brother’s party!

“You know, Eudine, I’ll bet that awful woman is mixed up in this somehow,” Alice said, knocking scraps of paper and tea-stained invoices onto the floor as she rifled through the heap on her desk. “She was just determined to sabotage me.”

“It don’t think it was her,” Eudine said.

“Pardon?” Alice didn’t look up from her papers. It was so difficult to keep track of all of the details.

“I believe, I think maybe Mr. Phillips had some people he wanted … I mean, some things he ordered separate.”

“Royce? No, that can’t be. He said he wouldn’t … I handled all the details myself.” Alice blinked rapidly. She felt a tightening in her throat.

“Is the other caterer still coming later?” Alice meant to ask the question boldly, but when she opened her mouth to speak, all that came out was a small, little-girl voice.

Eudine gazed at her. “I don’t believe so, ma’am,” she replied softly.

“I’ll just … I’ll just go upstairs and call to straighten this out,” Alice said again.

Humiliation burned her cheeks. She wondered when Royce had cancelled her caterer, and in what other ways he’d embarrassed her, and when he’d conspired with Eudine. Alice could feel her smirking behind her. She climbed the stairs slowly, head high and back straight. At the top, she paused, picked up a vase with both hands and threw it to the floor. What delight, what release in its shattering.

11:00 A.M.

Gloom crept through the house like an ice age. The morning was all but gone, and Alice had managed only to change out of her dungarees and back into her bathrobe. Time so often passed that way—Alice foundering until the day had dwindled to a sliver and she was forced into frenzied action: the household requirements, dressing for dinner in time for Royce’s return from the hospital, shopping for the groceries and sundries Billups couldn’t manage to get for himself. Alice sighed. It was clear the day would not brighten. She wanted to go back to bed, to spend all of her days in bed until spring came. But then what? Spring would arrive with its loud colors, and people would go about happily because the season had changed, and Alice would have to go about happily as well. In summer she and Royce would spend July at the house on the Vineyard, the large airy rooms, the champagne-colored curtains lifting and billowing in the breeze, the ice cubes tinkling like wind chimes against the crystal glasses, and the conversation tinkling in that same delicate, frivolous way. The air would smell like taffy and drying seaweed, and they would wear white, and there would be still more happiness. So much happiness. It was almost as exhausting as this relentless February.