White People (24 page)

My Northern roommate grilled me, Wasn’t Little Bobby really just your basic “slum lord?” Didn’t he lease to the white merchants who overcharged blacks?

At school, around 2 a.m., stoned illegally, I tried ignoring this, tried telling my suitemates the story about Lancaster’s mule. Before I even got near the punch line, my pals walked out. “Guess … you had to’ve been there,” I explained to an empty dorm room. Maybe turns-of-speech involving mules didn’t cut the mustard after 1962, didn’t translate beyond Falls’s city limits. Maybe Little Bobby Grafton would remain an acquired taste.
I
now considered him remarkable, but my own reasons might be genetically determined, too simple to quite name or recognize. Maybe Grand’s charms could never be explained by a college-bound “Bryan”? Only some Willy could tell the plain and salty truth of “Ears” Grafton, loving witness to others’ wit, the not-pretty poor kid who lived in trouble, who met and wooed a downed lady worthy of satin sheets. A sharecroppers’ kid who, though often crossed, never ever snitched, not once.

For the month after her funeral, he refused to leave their house. He seemed afraid Ruth might return and not find him waiting. Then we heard how Mr. Grafton had paid unannounced social calls on two recent widows. These handsome women were confused when he sat beside them on settees, saying little while glaring hard at their wrists, their necks. Maybe Bobby planned to appear amorous. He first looked peeved, then dangerous. He slid onto one knee, tried kissing a lady’s hand the way some foreign baron might. She yelped,
set her pug dogs barking, showed him out. Hoping to lighten things, Grand smiled. “I guess
you
know why everbody says ‘tighter’n Lessie Poland’s boot,’ huh?”

“Why you say
what?”
(She was new here.)

When he turned up at my folks’ place, Grand wasn’t wearing mourning black. He arrived in plaids-over-stripes. Knotted around his neck, one unclean polka-dotted bow tie. Most of a piece of blueberry pie was crusted on it, the archaeology of a good meal. My mother first tried teasing him, hoping the indirect approach might work. “What?” He stared at his own ragamuffin outfit. “Myself, I can’t see it, Helen. To me it’s all just clothes. Lucky to have them. They cover you, they come in different colors, so what?”

Mother said she really should take his bow tie off and go out in our backyard and bury it as a dog would bury a bone. Then, hearing herself, Mother laughed, adding. “I’m beginning to sound like …” but she hushed, quit smiling. He looked up then. “Like who?
Say
her name. I want to hear you say her
name
, Helen.”

“Like Ruth,” Mother said. “I was going to say I sounded like Ruth complaining she was sounding too much like you.”

He grinned, nodding, jaunty. “She was merciless, okay,” and tears, sudden amazing amounts, came pouring down a face the color of boiled ham.

This business about the mixed-up clothes might sound like nothing, really. But you’d be surprised how strange and funny it can look, how disturbing. With Ruth alive, Bobby usually wore white shirts, dark trousers, black business shoes, and semi-loud ties (his wife’s one concession to the taste of a man who admired carny-barker types like Buck Lancaster). Grand loved having youngbloods around town call, “Mighty flashy handpainted tie you got there, Mr. Grafton.” “
I
thought so,” he’d wink.

But now at the mall, Grand appeared a sad hick farmer arrived to purchase some item expensive as a tractor, some guy fearful of being taken, maybe thinking he’d blend in better if hidden by the right number of city plaids.

When I came home from school, my folks drove Grand and all of us to a new restaurant. The organist was playing, the place was
dark, Grand was offered a large black leatherette menu. Finally he leaned across the table, whispered to me, “Where are the
numbers
of the hymns listed, Will? She always marks my hymns for me.”

Others heard. My father offered the benefit of the doubt. “Like church, Daddy? ‘Good one.’” The old man’s face changed; he grabbed my father’s wrist, hard. Grand then checked around and—world’s worst liar—forced a grin. “Don’t I know? Didn’t I plan that? My own flesh and blood, and it can’t even take a joke?”

We laughed. Yes. Oh,
ha
ha ha.

M
Y FATHER
was at his law office meeting with six bigwig clients come to file a class action; Grand popped in unannounced. The secretary had just adjourned to the bathroom, Grand passed her desk and shuffled through double doors into the conference room. Little Bobby hadn’t shaved for a week. He wore red bedroom slippers, a tasteful windbreaker, and a striped shirt, but he’d put the windbreaker on first. He carried, for some reason, a can of 3-in-1 oil. “How
about
this weather?” He settled at the long teak table. When people stared, he smiled. “Hot enough for you?” Soon as my dad got the conference uneasily restarted, Grand nodded off, sitting upright, snoring tenderly. Since the six clients were not from Falls, it all proved harder to explain. These were the kind of high-powered folks who might’ve called a sheriff if they saw some vintage Packard weaving lane to lane. New people.

Such business-hour visits happened often after that. My father was too shy or kind to tell Grand his turning up uninvited was not exactly … convenient. When the old man barged in on meetings with locals, Dad could say, “You’ve all met my father.” But with important out-of-towners, Dad shrugged. “A relative,” adding, quieter, “period of grieving here.” Dad confessed at dinner, “Listen, you all, it might get worse. I’m one step away from ‘I’ve never seen this man before in my life.’” We laughed. What else could you do? Grand had stayed too lucid for locking up in some home. But, interrupting another legal meeting, Bobby told one Yankee client, “Yeah, brought Arthur downtown with me today.” “Really?” The woman looked around
for help; Father sat rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Yeah.” Grand winked, “Arthur-it is.”

“Ah-ha.”

Sheriff Wilks, a man of principle, refused to revoke Grand’s license, even when Mother drove down with some brownies, then begged. Two days in a row Grand was found patrolling our county courthouse. He had come, he told some carpenters working on office partitions, to buy the title for a twenty-acre farm five miles southeast of town, the old Redmond place, please. Grand knew the soil there very well. He had decided it’d be perfect for soybeans and now wanted to buy it as a little family spread. He needed it at once. He had the money on him. He was walking around showing strangers this great wad of hundred-dollar bills.

The county registrar, a family friend, noticed him and was very patient and helped him look up the deed. She phoned my parents only on finding that Redmond had died in 1880 and that Grand’s own father had bought the tract at auction, had fallen behind with payments, and, in 1912, lost it. These twenty acres were zoned for business around 1946. The old mall had stood right there since late
’62
.

I
WAS HOME
from school. I planned mailing a turquoise bracelet and some philosophy paperbacks to my girlfriend, stuck at home on vacation with
her
parents. At the Falls post office I spied one old-timer flipping through Wanted posters. He wore green fishing boots, coveralls, a seersucker suitcoat. The same Wanted signs have hung on the wall since I was a kid. Other people noted the old guy; they slowed for a second, then maneuvered gingerly around him. People seemed to consider him harmless—but also about as crazy as … as an I don’t know what.

I have to say this on my behalf. I was sixteen, a delicate age for enduring public scenes and family embarrassments. I headed toward my grandfather. He would be glad to see me. I could make a joke: “Found any good bank robbers lately?” “Got Arthur along?” something. Then I noticed that, at a table marked with today’s date, he
was using the chained ballpoint. He’d got some paper towels from the bathroom (when I was sixteen, clean restrooms were still open to the public in all U.S. post offices!). The towels appeared covered with finely printed notes. He must’ve lingered here all morning, transcribing. A Styrofoam cup of cold-looking coffee waited on one marble ledge. He slumped forward, jotting, muttering, secretive. I still felt I could handle this. I took a few steps closer, when I saw the drawings. He was copying one criminal’s face. He was trying to.

He’d done other portraits. Some of these sketches were weirdly good, carefully shaded with blue ballpoint. His being able to actually sort of draw made it all seem worse to me and weirder. Since early morning, he’d been down here for every citizen of Falls to see. Was he trying to memorize likely fugitives? Did he want to recollect certain faces he’d known and lost, like the mug of shady, witty Lancaster? Would Grand now drive along the streets of Falls, bounty-hunting crooks? I never knew. I stared at the back of this man, his farmer’s neck so deeply creased it pleated. Others stayed clear of him. One passing older woman saw me noticing. She offered the brisk eye-rolling look that sane nervous strangers give each other. It’s ugly. It means: “Sad, yes. But
we’re
not like him.”

What I did next, I told myself, was really out of pity, gratitude, even love. After all, he seemed so happy, so busy over there.

I slipped out the side exit.

F
OUR DAYS
before Grand died, Mother played hostess to a regional Master’s Bridge Championship. I personally consider card games fairly silly, a waste of everybody’s time. But back then bridge was important to her.

Over the years, five people have made it their mission to teach me the game. We endure one nice long comical evening; then they each mercifully give up on me. I urge them to. Even so, I’d played enough to know the game, and over one bored rainy Christmas vacation spent in Falls recovering from pneumonia, I saw what a genius my mother was at it. She has a mind that any captain of industry might covet. I don’t know who to blame for her wasting it on cards. Society?
or her? or cards themselves? She’s never really seemed all that miffed about the waste.

The championship at our house mattered not at all to me, but I’d seen her planning it for months. And so, though I was sixteen and though this proved hard, I stayed out of her way and, for once, kept my irony to myself.

The limo of our governor’s wife was double-parked out front. A uniformed driver buffed its chrome—a cake-decoration-sized state flag rode each fender and looked fairly absurd there. I was a kid. So much of the world then looked ridiculous to me, but these flags, I think, still would.

Our house held eighty-eight distinguished white women. Card tables were arranged everywhere, ashtrays and chairs borrowed from the caterer. I’d retreated to my room upstairs but could hear a musical chatter-natter. It already sounded like a great chummy success.

I remember the next part in this order: I came sneaking down the back stairs, eager for a secret lunch snitched off canapé trays. I knew from other parties how twenty-two tables of visiting ladies love catching sight of the household’s big-eared if not-unhandsome teenaged son. They really check you out, shameless, giving you the once-over from the feet up. I hated that. I hated acting polite to grown-ups I didn’t respect. I didn’t respect many adults then. I did not yet understand what-all they had to put up with.

So I’m dodging down our back stairs when I hear two State Bureau of Investigation detectives drag in a whimpering man. They had him by his wrists. He thrashed between them in the foyer, pleading loud, “You’re
hurting
Arthur.” His pants were covered with sticky seed-pods from some walk through some woods. He wore a shirt with buggy races occurring all across it. His fly was unbuttoned and a goodly number of the printed racing buggies tufted out there as at some finish line. He wore a rolled knitted sailor’s cap from the Army-Navy outlet; he sported a green clip-on bow tie. There was about him the look and scent of a fellow too smart, absentminded, or aggrieved to bathe very often.

Two young men wrestled him from the living room, where our governor’s wife had just ceased dealing. They pushed him more
toward Mother. She rose, gone ash-white, frowning as at some difficult eye chart. “Smarts,” the old man stated. “These boys are big and they keep
hurting
me.” My mother and I hollered it at the same moment:
“Let him go!”

Since she hadn’t seen me on the stairs, my voice made her jump. She spun my way, gave a long, freighted look up the steps, a look that might be freely translated
“Oh, shit
. Darling, what are we to
do
here?”

“Ma’am, we caught him hiding under your neighbor’s carport. When he spotted us watching, he got down on all fours behind a hedge, then made a break for your house. Calls himself Arthur. Claims to know you, ma’am.”

My mother nodded. “He did … does.” She was fairly panting now. Her fixed, mournful smile slayed me. I eased down the stairs, hoping to be of use, still her dutiful eldest. In silence, Mother’s face told me, Darling, if you get him out of here right now before it’s even worse, I’ll give you anything in the world,
anything
.

But as I stepped toward my grandfather, now released and massaging his thin reddened wrists, he noticed eighty-eight women. Some gazed down from the stair landing. They’d gone dead quiet on the sunporch. Grand toured a crowded, frozen dining room; he stalked the living room, progressing rubber to rubber. The old man frowned at a house suddenly paved with card tables, four well-appointed women settled at each, all holding cards like geisha hand fans in the air before them. The women were quite correct to gape back at him. His arriving between two state agents was reason enough, but the clothes drew a little extra attention.

Then Grand smiled over at Mother. He’d got it. His sun-cooked face spread, wonderful with pleasure. “Helen, why, you sly dog you! You’ve gone and opened a rest-aurant. That’s a good one. Always did claim you were smart, I don’t care what Ruth said. Now every inch of your place is a little moneymaker, right? You little thief. And still pretty as a speckled puppy, too. Just look at all the suckers you’ve stuffed in here. Hi, ladies! Why, it’s right cozy. You kept it
like
a house, but you’re not leaving your customers too much extra legroom, packing them in like sardines, eh, you operator? You got
it all over that son of mine. He still having a hard time making a go of the office? I hope you two don’t
need
a restaurant. But, sugar, tell Little Bobby something off-the-record-like—how’d you get around the
zoning?”