Beggar of Love (2 page)

It should have come to her the minute she saw Ginger with Mitchell and the suitcases, but it didn’t hit her until Aisha, with her puzzled words, spoke the eulogy for their decades of love. The giant oak of herself fell to the ground, uprooted by the ice storm that had hovered over every lover since the beginning of time.

Was this what Ginger felt every night Jefferson didn’t come home or returned reeking of the scent of calumny? Ginger was beautiful, but what she’d taken for quietness in Ginger had become a savage coldness in recent years. Had Ginger felt this way while staring through their apartment windows at the iron balcony railing, fenced into a relationship full of spikes and bars? Was there a way to survive this devastation?

The city under its dirty crust of snow looked shredded and ravaged. Jefferson, spent in every cell of her body, walked the nearly sixty blocks home, every street bringing back a pulverizing memory of Ginger, every side street the one into which Ginger had disappeared. She felt as if she was crawling all the way.

At four, she was too big for the church. Emmy, her mother, had dressed her in a navy blue Easter coat with a white lace collar, white gloves, lace-topped white anklets, shiny black shoes with straps, and a flowered dress that stopped, like the coat, short of her skinned knees. She felt like she had been shrunk in the wash and stuffed into doll clothes. She hated doll clothes. She hated dolls. She hated church and the drone of the organ that filled the stuffy air with its sad wheezing.

If only she could stretch tall. Instead, she did a silent inside stretch, but it only made her smile to pretend she would pop the buttons on her dress and inflate right to the ceiling of this big building. Her tight fists would smash through the stained-glass windows, and on the way up her shoulders, wide as Popeye’s, would nudge the scary cross off the wall so she wouldn’t have to look at that poor man and his bleeding hands.

She, Amelia Jefferson, would be like Alice in Wonderland—so tall she’d fill the rabbit hole and crash through the peaked roof and never have to be a little Episcopalian princess again.

“Amelia, stand still,” hissed Emmy, who had complained of a splitting headache on the way to church. Amelia knew she would have a headache today because she’d heard Emmy throwing up in the master bath on the other side of the wall during the night. She was never going to drink; first the grown-ups got silly and then they got sick. It was the only time they hugged her and cuddled her, though.

“Sing,” Emmy said.

She sang loud. She sang like she was yelling the hymn at the boys up the street when they played cowboys and Indians. She yelled out all her squirmishness. She yelled so she wouldn’t stretch so big she’d destroy the church. She sounded like those great big opera singers Emmy and Jarvy listened to on records.

“Quietly,” commanded her father, Jarvy, on the other side of her. His hand shook as it held hers, and his breath had that awful smell of peppermint toothpaste and whiskey.

“Sweetly,” said Emmy.

Amelia didn’t know how. She wanted to explain why she couldn’t sing quietly, but she wasn’t allowed to talk. If she did tell them why, they’d look at her the way they did when she was being wrong, and she was always being wrong. The light in the church, already dim, grew dimmer. So she marched then, which sometimes helped keep the dark away, whispered the words she guessed she was supposed to sing, and lifted her knees up, down, up and down, to keep time. Everything kept getting darker. She rested the rifle on her shoulder, its butt in the palm of her hand. Jack and Glen up the street were the Indians and she was going to shoot them. The boys were good at grunting, spinning, and gasping out a last breath.

Once they were dead she’d lead the little girls across the street out of danger, hitch a horse to the covered wagon, and make her tongue go “Cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck” as she and the other girls traveled out West to build a cabin where the sun was.

“Amelia!” came Emmy’s whisper. She’d been clucking aloud and not paying attention. It was time to sit. She was sleepy, but she wasn’t allowed to nap in church. She would think about something. She would think about the girls across the street, Cynthia and Fern. Was it okay to smile? She guessed not. Last week Cynthia was home from first grade. Fern was with their grandma because she had a cold and couldn’t go to kindergarten. Cynthia was a big girl and mostly didn’t like to play with Amelia. But that day, with her sister away, she did.

Why did they get in trouble? Cynthia was playing on her bed. She had Tinkertoys. Amelia got on the bed to play too. They made a train and then got under the covers to make a tunnel. The sheets were snow. Their legs were mountains. It was nice under there and she felt awful good, tingly shivery all over. She wanted to snuggle with Cynthia and take a nap. Maybe Cynthia would kiss her on the top of her head like Emmy did before she went to a party. Both mothers came into the girls’ bedroom and yelled at them. Why weren’t they allowed to be under the covers together?

She sat so still she would never be able to move again. Why did she have to do things she didn’t like doing? Why couldn’t she do what she liked to do? That darkness came around her, like night. She tried not to cry, but she felt awful. She wished she had a magic potion like the one in the story her grandmother read to her. It would make her think good thoughts.

Maybe Jack and Glen would be home after Easter dinner. In back of their house was a hill down to the brook. This time, if none of the bigger boys were playing, she’d win at King of the Hill. Last time she got rolled down the hill and she’d ended up with a nose full of dirt. She didn’t go crying to Emmy like the little kids. She blew her nose on some big leaves and scrubbed the dirt off with water from the brook. She still got in trouble for the grass stains, but the big kids got in more trouble for tearing up the grass.

Thinking about playing King of the Hill made her feel strong. Late afternoons, sometimes the sun looked like pancake syrup dripping through the trees. She would twirl Jack around and around and then let go at the top of the hill so he’d fall and roll to the bottom. Glen was six; she might have to wrestle him down and then give him a push. She was stronger than those two. She was stronger than the other girls. She’d dance on the hilltop, the big winner, then climb the fence and run into the woods before they ganged up on her. That fence! This was the first year she could climb it. It was all up-and-down wood boards, but she knew how to shimmy up the posts now, grab hold of the acorn-looking things on top, and pull herself over.

They could never catch her when she ran, not even the big boys. She was faster and she was smarter. When they’d be about to grab her she’d jump behind a tree and run back the way she came. It was like when Emmy and Jarvy took her to the football game after the tailgate party and one of the big boys on the field ran in and out of the other boys who were trying to knock him down. She could be a football player when she grew up.

When she grew up and got married—she supposed she’d marry Jack or Glen—their children would call them Mommy and Daddy like Jack and Glen did with their parents. Emmy said Amelia couldn’t call her and Jarvy “Mommy and Daddy” because it made her feel too old. Emmy called Jarvy Jarvis when she was mad at him. Sometimes Emmy called him Daddy, she heard her. Whose Daddy was Jarvy, Emmy’s or hers?

That man up front was talking about the baby Jesus. Did ladies ever get to talk up front? Did the baby Jesus have to go to church with his mother and father like her? Did he feel like he didn’t belong too? If she was God she’d want these people outside in the woods or a park, not in some fancy building a bunch of sweaty guys had hammered together. Instead of sitting and being bored, they could plant trees, or play handball or something fun, right out there in daylight where God could see them. She bet baby Jesus would like that better than this.

Emmy told her to wake up and follow Jarvy out to the street. She could see their dark, shiny new Oldsmobile parked a little way up the street. “A ’63!” Jarvy told everybody, even if you weren’t supposed to brag. Maybe they’d go to the city today. She loved staying at Grandma and Grandpa Thorpe’s apartment in the city. That’s where they lived when she was just born, before they bought the house here on the hillside over the Hudson River in Dutchess. Sometimes they went back down to the city for days at a time. There was so much to see out the city window, especially after they put her to bed and the babysitter left her alone in the bedroom. In Dutchess, she couldn’t see anything but the patio and the hedges.

The minister was saying something to her. He could get her in trouble with God, so she said “Yes,” and looked down at her feet. They were always wanting her to say yes. They loved to say she was bashful when she didn’t have anything to say to the grown-ups.

“She is such a self-possessed little girl,” the minister told Emmy. Jarvy was lighting a cigarette with his gold lighter. “Like a little adult going about her business with utter self-confidence, unconcerned with the opinions of you or me.”

“Thank you,” her mother said and added, “I think.”

Jarvy, above her, said, “She’s a strange little one all right.”

Emmy nodded to her and Amelia took off running—smack into the car! Then she hopped on one leg to the sidewalk and pretended a hopscotch game was chalked there. She could go fast. She bet she could hop to the corner and back to the car without stopping before they finished talking to the minister, plus twirl around on one leg at the corner. She’d see if her cousins Ruth and Raymond could beat her at this.

Aunt Jillian lived in another old house, but hers was right on Main Street and had a gold thing on the front that Emmy said made the house part of history. Aunt Jillian had a lot of big framed pictures on the walls and this huge mirror that showed the big old houses across Main Street, like Aunt Jillian wanted the houses to be able to see how pretty they were. When she was little, Amelia would lie on the floor and rotate her body, looking at the picture-window homes, the mirrored trees, a hunting picture, the family portrait, the other scenery pictures, and the one of her grandfather. Since it was Easter, Grandmother and Grandfather were at Aunt Jillian’s too, even though they had moved part-time to the apartment in the city where they were close to his office and the things her grandmother liked to do, like the ballet and Bonwit Tellers.

You could see the house from the sidewalk, old-fashioned, like a little castle. Sometimes people going by would stop and snap pictures. When Amelia could get away, she would go out on the deep covered front porch and watch them watching the house, or she would lie on the cedar porch swing, out of sight of the viewers, so the creaking swing would look like it had a ghost moving it.

Mostly, she had to stay in the parlor with the family at Aunt Jillian’s. Now that she was four she had to dress like a young lady and sit on the couch, not talk to her cousins Raymond and Ruth. Everyone would be dressed up. Cousin Ruth, who was sixteen, wore nail polish and lipstick and drank long-stemmed glasses of wine. Why would she do all that before she was grown up and had to? Her father and Uncle Stephen drank highballs and talked about what they’d read in the papers, and Aunt Jillian and Emmy talked about the food they bought and clothing styles.

Eighteen-year-old Cousin Raymond was, her mother said, portly, and he tried to join in the conversation with the older men, smoking and with a drink in his hand too. His father said he would learn to drink responsibly by doing it at home. Amelia was never going to drink and get loud. Cousin Ruth would ask what grade Amelia was in and tell her what she could look forward to as a big girl at Dutchess Academy. Then it was usually time to eat roast beef, scalloped potatoes, and green beans in sauce, which was a lot better than listening to Cousin Ruth’s dumb stories about trying to get a boyfriend.

She’d wonder if someday she was really going to have a little Amelia or a Ruth and Raymond of her own, with some man like Uncle Stephen. She gagged on her green beans. The sauce tasted like sour milk. She wasn’t going to spend her life sitting in parlors with boring people. But what else was there? Did kids one day give in and turn into parents? She wouldn’t, that was for sure. And she wouldn’t cook scalloped potatoes or shop at Bonwit Tellers or go to the philharmonic. She would run. She would play games. Suddenly she knew what she wanted to be: a New York Yankee! When it wasn’t summer she’d teach the little kids to play games like she did now, teach them to play baseball like Mickey Mantle.

After dinner she couldn’t climb the trees in the yard because she was still in the Sunday dress Emmy bought last week. She couldn’t race anybody because her cousins were too fancy-pants. While the grown-up laughter and the record player inside got louder and louder, she lay on the porch swing playing ghost and thought about what she would do, who she would be like, if she would live in the city or upstate in Dutchess. She had no idea.

She bounced her pink Spaldeen down the wood porch steps and back up, down and back up again and again. She challenged herself to do it perfectly: one bounce per step, no skipped steps, hit the middle of each step. When she got all that right she had to bounce higher and use the same rules. Then harder, higher—the ball went into a prickly bush. It didn’t have any leaves, so she could see it.

The front door opened. She was trying to get out of the bush. Her dress was still caught on so many stickers. Emmy’s face looked like she was watching horror movies on TV. She didn’t say anything to Amelia. She only turned around and slammed back into the house.

Amelia felt like the nightmare she always had of free-falling through a hole to China, screaming “Emmy! Jarvy!” and they had no arms to catch her. But she wasn’t falling. She was stuck.