Without Prejudice (3 page)

But Gladys ignored him, and concentrated on the pork chops she was lifting now, one by one, onto a platter lined with paper towel. ‘Don’t that smell good?’ she said out loud, which made Bobby only cry harder. She put down her fork and turned off the gas burner on the white enamel stove top, then began to untie her apron. Bobby moved towards her, still wailing, and she stood stockstill – which encouraged him to think she had time for him now, and he held his arms out, unambiguously asking to be hugged.

She reached out and patted him on top of his head, but ignored his outstretched arms. ‘Child, you stop your crying now.’

But he couldn’t, and as the tears kept running down his face he saw through his watery eyes a look of exasperation start to spread on Gladys’s face. Suddenly, she reached down and grabbed his wrist, then waddling towards the door began to lead him out of the room. He resisted at first, but she tightened her grip and kept moving her bulky frame until he was forced to go with her or risk being dragged across the floor.

She took him all the way to the back of the apartment, down the dark hall, then along the short passageway to the back bedroom.

‘Go on and play with them,’ she said, pointing at the pool of marbles he’d left on the thin carpet between the twin beds. He looked at them dumbly, wondering why his mother wasn’t there and why in the world he had been left alone with this fat mean woman. And then she left, too.

He sat on the floor with his legs crossed Indian-style, staring at the marbles almost without recognition, so focused was he on his own misery. He cried again, and kept crying, unselfconsciously, although a little part of him hoped that by crying louder – he did this at one point – it would somehow draw someone back to comfort him.

In desperation, he twice went up to the kitchen: the first time Gladys said nothing at all but simply clutched him again by the wrist and led him back to the back bedroom. The second time she wasn’t in the kitchen, and he started to panic, since somehow being left alone was worse even than being left with this Gladys creature, and he ran out into the dining room and into the sun porch and through the living room, his fears growing into uncontrolled agitation, until he found her in the front hall dusting the big chest of drawers.

His relief was so great that he could not understand why Gladys did not share it, for she gave an exasperated sigh and this time when she deposited him again in the bedroom in front of the untouched array of marbles, she closed the door solidly behind her as she left.

He waited as he heard her slow heavy steps go along the hallway towards the front of the apartment, then he quickly went to the door. But he couldn’t open it: the brass handle would start to turn in his small hand then slip back. He tried using both hands but it didn’t work.

This time his crying was solely for himself – he had given up on the idea that it would bring comfort from Gladys, or even her presence. He cried for so long that he wondered if there could be tears left inside him to come out. He thought with desperation about his mother. Normally she would collect him from school, his face lighting up as he saw her, tall in a cotton dress in the kindergarten doorway, her hair a mass of blonde curls. They’d bustle along the street towards home, while she chattered away, and then she would give him a snack in the kitchen and plan the rest of their afternoon – he could watch
Captain Kangaroo
and
Mickey Mouse
, then sit in the kitchen with a pad of paper and a fistful of pens while she started supper and sang along with the radio.

But he found the images of her kept being replaced by an entirely imagined one of her lying in a hospital bed, which did not comfort him at all. He lay down himself, on his back on the floor, and stared without interest at the cracks that ran like routes on a road map across the ceiling.

He was still lying there when the door suddenly opened and Gladys stood there, breathing heavily. ‘Y’all come eat now,’ she said, and at first he looked at her with incomprehension.

‘Food,’ she said, and at first he thought she’d said ‘fool’, which would not surprise him, since recently it had been Lily’s favourite putdown for him, but then Gladys added, ‘Come get your supper now, child.’

He followed her reluctantly back to the kitchen and he sat at the rickety table as she put his plate down. It was heaving: an immense fried pork chop with a long protective rib of fat, a mound of mashed potato and a heap of yellow corn kernels, a biscuit, and a large cup of milk. She eyed him carefully as he took his fork, unsure whether he was meant to use the knife as well – his mother always cut his meat for him – but then blessedly the phone rang, which distracted Gladys.

From the way she answered and talked he realised she was speaking with his father. ‘Yes, sir, we be just fine. I’m giving him fried food for his supper and I bet he eats it all. Now don’t worry, and I’ll see you later at the end of the day.’

She paused and he could hear his father’s voice – rich and deep – on the line. Gladys said, ‘Yes, he cried after you left, Mr Danziger. That boy cried his share, and then some. But he done crying now.’

Which was true. His tears had stopped the very moment futility had taken over.

After this, Gladys was there every day. He didn’t know if he hated her more than he feared her, just that he felt both emotions. He tried to tell Lily this, but she scolded him in that prim way of hers that made him realise it had been a mistake to tell her how he felt. ‘She’s a Negro,’ Lily said. ‘That’s why you don’t like her.’

‘What?’ he’d tried to protest, astonished by her accusation. What was a Negro anyway? It couldn’t be anything good if Gladys was one.

At first, he asked for his mother each morning at breakfast, and daily his father replied evenly that she was still in hospital. One morning inspiration seized him and he asked if he could go and see her. No, his father explained, little kids were not allowed there, and Bobby wondered what he could do that might make his mother even worse.

His father always took him to school in the morning, and sometimes his father would tell the funny stories he had always told – about the polar bear field, which is what he called the empty lot on Dorchester, and the exotic animals that lived there whom only he and his father could see. But now he was often preoccupied and in a rush to get to his own grown-up kind of school, and even at home he would hole up in his study, typing and smoking, leaving Bobby to Gladys.

Miss Partridge was his sole ray of light. ‘Your teacher is a bird,’ Mike said at breakfast one day, and Bobby said, ‘But a nice bird’ so seriously that his father’s laugh got cut short when he saw Bobby’s expression. And then one day at school she wasn’t there, and Mrs Jacobs, who was perfectly all right but not a woman he had any real liking for, told him in the sickly sweet voice he was learning to associate with bad news that Miss Partridge had got married and wouldn’t be teaching there any more. And he was baffled at first, then stunned by yet another betrayal.

Within two weeks his father didn’t even reply to his daily question about his mother’s whereabouts, only shrugging slowly as he stood like a poor man’s Gladys over the morning’s skillet of bacon and eggs. So Bobby stopped asking. He brought it up with Mike once, but Mike said tersely, ‘She’s real sick, Bobby. I think Dad’s scared she’s going to die.’ Which explained the evening when right before bed he heard his father speaking on the phone to Gramps, saying, ‘It’s kind of tough, Dad,’ and then suddenly his father’s voice seemed to choke and Bobby realised he wasn’t saying anything because sobs had replaced words in his throat. That scared him more than almost anything, because he had never seen his father cry – he had been a captain in the army way back in a war, so how could he cry? Did this mean his mother was really going to die?

He felt he was in a dark tunnel, like the lightless hallway in the apartment that ended in the back bedroom. He could not understand why this had happened to him – he had no previous awareness of misfortune. Sometimes his parents had talked about an ‘accident’, and he knew that people sometimes died, which meant they went away for good. Like his mother? Not according to Mike and Lily, though he detected uncertainty there too, and they grew angry with him now when he asked when their mother would come back. Yet truth was, if his mother wasn’t dead, then why wasn’t she at home? She might as well be dead, he thought in an inchoate way, since four weeks seemed a year at least to a little boy his age.

He was too little to understand anything about memory or time, but he knew enough to conclude that life was something to be endured, and that in this respect he had a long, long way to go before it was over. He felt he had been propelled out of a happy existence into a misery which bore only the most superficial relationship to what he’d had before. He still had a brother and sister, there were still meals to be eaten; he still slept in a bed – but the switch to happiness was now turned off.

Then one day his father picked him up from nursery, and as they left the big brick house on Kimbark Avenue he said enigmatically, ‘I’ve got a little surprise for you.’

‘Where?’ said Bobby, rather than what, since ‘where’ remained his focus – especially where his mother was.

‘At home. It’s not Mom,’ he added quickly, but Bobby had not allowed himself to think it was.

His heart sank nonetheless, and he muttered, ‘Gladys,’ thinking his father thought the prospect of helping her roll out biscuits was a treat.

‘No,’ said his dad. ‘Not Gladys. You’ll see.’

When they got back to the apartment, his father whistled when he opened the door, and called out, ‘Hey ho, we’re here.’ He sounded better than he had for ages. Bobby went with him through the corridor to the kitchen, where Gladys was standing at the stove. Only it wasn’t Gladys: this woman was as black as Gladys, but much younger. She wasn’t fat at all, he thought to himself, though she had a large bosom beneath her grey sweater. Her skirt was short, and he could see her legs – Gladys had always hid hers in long white cotton shifts and the ubiquitous apron the size of a tent. This woman had youthful pretty features, and she looked directly at him before his father had said a word.

‘This is Bobby,’ his father said hopefully.

She nodded. Then she slapped her cheeks with both hands. ‘Why, ain’t you the cutest little boy I ever done seen,’ she exclaimed.

His grandmother had called him cute once, and his brother Mike had never let him forget it. But right now he didn’t care what Mike would think, and he smiled shyly at this woman. She smiled back and her white teeth gleamed, though looking up at her mouth Bobby could see the gold glitter of several fillings.

She turned to his father and said, ‘Maybe you need to find something in your study, Mr Danziger.’ For a moment, his father looked puzzled. Then he took the hint and left the room.

The woman smiled again at Bobby and said, ‘Come here, honey, and let me take a look at you.’

He took a small step towards the stove and she leaned down until her face was almost level with his. Suddenly he wanted to run to her, but he hesitated. When he tried to hug Gladys she usually shooed him away. ‘Child, don’t be bothering me,’ was her automatic response.

But this woman was holding her arms wide open in an unmistakable signal. He waited just the same. For he was old enough, perhaps experienced enough even in his young years, to sense that he simply could not bear being let down again.

Then she said, ‘Come here, baby,’ and the next thing he knew he was in her arms. They were warm and comforting, but he began to cry anyway. The tears he shed may have been for his mother – yes, almost certainly – but they were also for the despairing days he had been through since his mother had gone away. And tears from sheer relief at this embrace, the first sign that maybe life didn’t need to seem endless after all.

‘That’s all right,’ she was saying into his ear, and he felt his tears streaked along her cheek. ‘You just cry as much as you need to. I ain’t going nowhere. Vanetta and you are going to have us a good time together. Just you wait and see.’

III

T
HE COFFEE SHOP
was a vast tiled room on the ground floor of the Marchese Building, an early brick-fronted skyscraper of twenty-odd floors that sat on Wacker Drive, a stone’s throw across the Chicago River from the pearl-veined stone of the Wrigley Building. This late in the afternoon the place was almost empty, and the waitress told him to take his pick of tables. He scanned the room for Duval, but saw only an elderly couple nursing cups of coffee, a family of tourists having Cokes, and an old black man with a beard reading in the far corner. Robert breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be there first.

He didn’t know what to expect, didn’t even have a good sense of what Duval looked like. The skinny awkward kid Robert had known must have filled out. Didn’t all convicts lift weights, grow muscle-bound? Presumably for protection – Robert knew prison life was violent, scarily so; even the most unrealistic television dramas showed a life of brute force and fear. He had to assume Duval would be toughened unrecognisably by years spent in the company of murderers, perpetrators of violent assaults, extreme degenerates. Then he remembered what Duval himself was supposed to have done.

He looked out the windows at the construction hole where the Sun Times building had stood – a modern aluminium shell, it had lasted only forty years, and he could almost feel the Marchese crow at the demise of its upstart neighbour.

‘Just coffee, please,’ he said to the waitress as she held out a menu. She filled his cup while he wondered what Duval might want to talk about. They hadn’t seen each other in over twenty years, had not been friends for over thirty. There had to be some agenda, something Duval wanted. He realised his curiosity had been overtaken by apprehension. He wanted to leave, but this seemed cowardly – besides, Duval would probably just call him again.

He looked around, noticing how the couple was sitting mute. Was this the silence of complete familiarity, or recognition that after so many years they had exhausted all possibilities for conversation? Probably both. Thank God he hadn’t reached that point with Anna. Whatever the ups and downs they had between them, there was always conversation – sometimes funny (she often made him laugh), sometimes heated, sometimes calm. But always talk.

Behind the elderly couple the black man was studying his book intently. He wore old-fashioned wire-framed reading glasses, and when he looked up the frames glinted in the light. His eyes caught Robert’s and he nodded shyly, then suddenly his face broke into a toothy smile. And Robert thought, Oh, my God, it’s him.

‘Duval?’ The man nodded. Robert stood up and moved over to the man’s table, where he put down his cup. They shook hands; Duval’s was dry, and roughly calloused. He had taken his glasses off and his dark brown eyes looked intently at Robert, in a slow assessment that made Robert uneasy, as if he were being compared to some long-stored image.

They both sat down, Robert with his back now to the river. Duval wore a dark suit, brown-and-silver tie, and a white shirt with an oversized collar that bobbed around his throat. His face was long and oval-shaped, and his wiry hair was cropped short. A thin line of beard ran along each side of his jaw until it widened like a protective cup around his chin. Duval sat upright, like a man of the cloth ill at ease in restaurants.

‘I could tell you didn’t recognise me. Bet you thought, That old black guy can’t be Duval.’

This was so true that Robert felt enveloped by awkwardness. ‘Maybe something like that,’ he conceded.

Duval smiled. ‘And here I was thinking, That old white guy can’t be Bobby.’

Robert laughed with relief. ‘It’s good to see you, Duval.’

Duval nodded but didn’t say anything.

‘You look well.’ He hesitated, feeling ill at ease again. ‘Nice suit,’ he added, and felt stupid for the remark.

Duval pinched the lapel with his long fingers. ‘Thirty years old and still going strong. Of course it didn’t get a lot of wear for twenty-four of them.’

There didn’t seem a suitable response, so Robert decided to stick to the present. ‘Where are you living?’

‘I’m staying with my cousin Jermaine. He’s got a spare room. Real nice.’ The voice was soft, a touch above middle range of pitch.

‘What happened to Vanetta’s house?’

‘She left it to my mama. Aurelia needed the money, so she sold it right away.’ He said this without emotion.

‘How is Aurelia?’

‘She passed away a year after Vanetta did.’ He was silent momentarily, then seemed to gather himself. ‘You know,’ he said, an almost imperceptible tremor to his voice, ‘I didn’t just want to see you to say hello. I also wanted to thank you.’

‘Thank me?’ Robert was nonplussed.

‘Yes,’ said Duval. ‘For all that you and your family did for Vanetta while I was away.’

Away? Duval said this as if he’d been gone on an extended business trip, seconded to some faraway city – Mexico City, say, or Rio – by his parent company.

‘I don’t know if we did anything all that special, Duval.’ He’d sent Vanetta a present every year, usually a hundred-dollar bill folded in a Christmas card. His father would have wanted to do the right thing but no more – a Christmas card, a phone call once or twice a year to say hello. And Robert couldn’t believe his stepmother had indulged in any display of largesse. Not that tight old stick.

‘Well, Vanetta said you did. Not long before she died. She came regular to see me.’

‘I know.’ She’d faithfully made the long drive as often as the rules allowed. Once a month? Something like that.

‘Why else would she tell me to come see you when I was free again?’

She had? Suddenly, for all his discomfort, Robert was content to see Duval again. I’m paying a debt to Vanetta, he told himself; it seemed the least he could do for her.

The waitress appeared, holding a Pyrex jug half-full of coffee. ‘Fill you gents up?’ she said.

They both shook their heads. ‘You want something to eat, Duval?’ asked Robert out of politeness, then saw the man hesitate. ‘Go on. I had a big lunch or I’d join you. Have a hamburger – my treat. It’s good to see you again.’

‘Actually,’ said Duval, and he looked shyly at the waitress, ‘what I’d really like is a piece of pie.’

The waitress recited. ‘Blueberry, cherry, chocolate cream, or lemon meringue.’

‘Blueberry.’

‘A la mode?’

Duval looked puzzled.

‘You want ice cream on top?’ asked Robert, and Duval nodded.

The waitress went away and Duval smiled with a little embarrassment. ‘I forgot that expression. We never got it that way.’

‘You sure that’s all you want to eat?’

He nodded. ‘I got me a sweet tooth but it’s easily satisfied.’ He laughed, then put one hand to his mouth as if he was trying to stop a cough. He put his hand down on the table and spread it; he had lengthy fingers and carefully tended nails.

Robert asked, ‘What’s Jermaine up to these days?’

‘He’s still working for R.R. Donnelley’s. He wants to retire in a couple of years.’ This was said wistfully, but then it must seem peculiar to find someone retiring when you were effectively starting out.

Mention of Jermaine eased something in Duval, like a blocked drain inexplicably cleared, for he started talking, hesitantly at first, then without self-consciousness, describing the present state of Vanetta’s vast extended family. He told Robert about Daphne, who’d just had a bypass, then Marvin (‘he passed last year’) and Rodney, who’d totalled his van on I-94 two years before but had emerged miraculously unscathed.

‘You remember Shonelle, don’t you?’ Duval asked at one point, and Robert smiled with false knowingness.

For the truth was he didn’t remember any of these people. It had all been so long ago, and he had never known most of them to begin with – they were just names mentioned by Vanetta. As Duval talked about a new generation of grandchildren and great-grandchildren – Lemar and Dennis and Kaleen and Lynette – Robert merely nodded and kept his head down, staring at Duval’s clasped hands on the table in front of him.

Suddenly noticing his gaze, Duval held up his ring finger, where he wore a slim gold band. ‘This was left me by Vanetta. It used to be Alvin’s.’

Vanetta’s younger brother; that Robert did know. He’d died while Robert was at boarding school, almost breaking Vanetta’s heart – the worst thing that ever happened to her, she’d told Robert. But that was before Duval’s arrest.

Then Duval asked, ‘How about your family? Is your daddy still alive?’

‘Just my stepmother. Dad died three years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘He was old, Duval, and in a lot of pain. The last few years were hard. I don’t think he wanted to go on.’

‘But Merrill’s all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert, amazed Duval remembered her name. ‘Lily looks after her.’

‘Where’s Mike?’

‘He’s up in Washington State, near Spokane. He was an army officer; retired last year. He’s fine, taking it easy.’ He deserved it; he’d fought in both Gulf Wars, real fighting too.

‘Vanetta said you got married and had yourself a family. Boys or girls?’

‘One girl.’

‘Really now. That’s what I call intelligent planning.’ He chuckled, but again his hand went to his mouth.

‘Well, actually, I’ve been divorced once – the first time didn’t work out. But I had a son – he’s grown now and lives in England.’

‘What’s he do for a living?’

‘He’s studying.’

Duval nodded earnestly. Robert thought of his boy, still technically an undergraduate, but just hanging in there by the skin of his backside if his tutor’s report was anything to go by.

‘I bet he’s doing good.’

‘I’m not sure he’d share your confidence. My boy’s a bit wild.’

‘Wild?’ Duval looked concerned for the first time. ‘You want to nip
that
in the bud.’

Robert shrugged. ‘He’s an adult now, Duval. Legally at least. He tends to listen to his mother more anyway. We didn’t have the friendliest divorce in the world, and he sided with his momma.’

Duval was sobered by this. Then his face brightened and he asked, ‘But you married again then?’

‘That’s right. She’s English, but she’s here too. And we got a little girl, Sophie.’
We got,
and a moment before
momma
– he heard his voice slipping into the half-black patois he’d used as a boy with Vanetta. Stop it, he told himself. Duval might think he was making fun of him.

‘A little girl – ain’t that sweet?’ Duval seemed to muse happily on this. The waitress delivered his pie, and his eyes shifted to his plate. ‘Say,’ he said, as he lifted his fork, ‘I meant to tell you, I went out to Hyde Park after I was released, had a good look around. It has changed, hasn’t it? You see that new building behind your place on Blackstone?’

‘I haven’t, actually. I haven’t been out there since we moved back.’

Duval looked disappointed. ‘You haven’t been out there at all? You should, you know. Sarnat’s is gone.’

‘Yes,’ said Robert measuredly. It had been gone for twenty years, turned into a restaurant.

‘And the Christian Science church got turned into a mosque for the brothers of Islam.’

‘That was a while back.’ Way, way back, he wanted to say.

‘Well, it ain’t no mosque no more. Place was all closed up, and the back entrance had barbed wire and a padlock big as my head. You know what I was doing there, don’t you?’

Should he? ‘What was that, Duval?’

‘Oh, come on, you must know,’ he said. Then perhaps sensing he’d only be disappointed again, he went on. ‘I was going to see the Secret Garden. All these years I could imagine it, and then when I get there it was all locked up.’

Christ, thought Robert, he must have known it wasn’t real. Of course they’d just been kids, when you could believe almost anything, but by now Duval had to know it had just been a fantasy.

Duval said, ‘I was going to go through the alley by the apartment and have a look that way, but they got a big gate up there too. I didn’t know really how I could explain myself if they asked what I was doing there.’

I can see that, thought Robert. It was not that there was anything physically threatening about Duval: he remained a beanpole; there was no evidence of weightlifting, no bulk there. But there was something disconcerting about his deep gaze, and how he stifled any laugh. The way his conversation veered around topics, moreover, suggested that the internal verbal mechanism of social discourse was slipping in and out of gear, like a car jerkily driven by a learner.

Duval reached inside his jacket and drew out a thin billfold of faded leather. ‘I got something to show you,’ he said with a sly smile, and handed over a small snapshot – it was framed by a tiny margin that had gone brown with age.

Robert peered at it, then held the photo up to the light. In the middle of the tiny square he could make out Vanetta, standing in a kitchen, facing the camera in a white skirt and a dark blouse. She had her arms around a boy on either side, and he could see that it was the young Duval, dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, as if for church. He wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine, and his front teeth stuck out as he smiled for the camera.