In the Slammer With Carol Smith (7 page)

I see she knows what that means. She’s looking at my new possession, which for want of anywhere else to put it, I have slung on the gorilla cage. A one-person backpack which can unfold to serve as an outdoor shelter. First designed according to the newspapers, by a minister in Philadelphia, it is reputed to have saved many a life-in-the-cold. Thousands are said to be now in use. People who still live inside tend to avert their eyes from the user carrying one; it is a badge. A few stare in envy. Not Carmen.

‘Found it at the thrift,’ I say in awe. ‘Brand-new.’ Everything in life ends up at that shop. There’s a moral lesson in every bin. I touch her cheek. ‘No bugs.’ She touches mine.

Tenement people are used to partings. It’s then you can embrace.

‘You no come back, Carol? You no can stay?’

What can I answer? My talent is otherwise. I bury my face in her shoulder. My hands grasp hers. I leave the barette in them.

By the time Angel comes, Daisy is back, and sleeping again. Sleep is her tent just now, but she is a house person. I shall be leaving her mine.

Angel lifts the bike down, cradling it. I unwind the glittering blue glass chain from the handlebars and put it around his neck. ‘Don’t go for too many marathons.’

He has something for me, from his mother. One of the mate gourds with its silver spoon, and a sack of mate.

I say, ‘I’ll send you a card.’

Now that the bike is gone, the freed desk looks at-the-ready. Like it’s upended only at night, to give the sleeper on the cot more elbow-room. Like it’s waiting, like any good desk, for me to practice my secretarial skills on it, including some not too classic Spanish. From the opposite wall, the rolled-up backpack answers it.…

In Dedham, September was the month we brought out the Hudson Bay blankets; in the mornings their stripings glowed like grates. Once a week we burned one of the lumps of cannel coal which were—as I had learned to say after the aunts each Sunday—‘As big as Titus’s heart’—he being the owner of the coal-and-wood yard who every New Years sent over the quarter ton we stretched throughout the year.

Titus’s great-grandfather, helped to come North by the abolitionists, the aunt’s great-grandfather among them, ended his days in that man’s household service, as what was known in the turreted mansions of that era as ‘the useful man’—his tasks, where other servants were of course kept, being to carry and sweep for them, attend the furnace and polish the brass only, the silver being the butler’s or housekeeper’s chore. All duties of lower degree, but in no sense a slave’s. Titus’s father had established the coal-yard. Titus’s own son, who went to Howard University and died in a war, attended high school with my aunts; in the pile of yearbooks he stands in the class picture between the two of them. He too perhaps had a heart.

A night-wind is moving the blind. We face the east here also, though city chill is not the same as in a house with enough windows for the decades to rattle through, and a staircase wide enough for all that had blown in. City steam swells and steeps you in your own juices, rather than truly warms. Cannel coal burned cleaner than the low-grade bits which served the one wing of the house that we kept open in winter, though any that came to us from Titus’s yard was first washed down. When the old man died my aunts, two fiercely single women who had learned from manuals how to solder burst pipe and rewire cables the mice had gnawed, took to washing the coal themselves. I—the useful child, helping. The aunt who taught in the daytime roused me for school; the one who taught in the evenings greeted my return. The air in that house was pure—like an ethic one didn’t know one had. I didn’t know they were saving for more than the college I mightn’t get a scholarship to. For the trust.…

Time for my pill. I’ll miss the refrigerator, which whenever I open it spoons out its own mite of encouragement. My Miss Tidy, waiting every day to be refilled, it belongs to a stationary future. A backpack is always urging you on. When I go, I’ll stick the note already in my pocket on the fridge door. ‘I’m off, Gold. For what you did for me there is no substitute. Keep on the room here if you want to. For yourself, not for me. Carmen will tell you where to pay the rent. Good luck. I’ll send you a card.’ Once the note was written up I saw I should have said Daisy instead of Gold, but let it be.

I take my pill. The past—the pills bury it. Else why do those on the ward, both the meek and the violent, try to refuse them, until forced? A pill buries the self that you are, that others must make manageable. Docile, one feels guilty for not being faithful to those depths.

Gold sleeps on, heavily. A ‘good’ SW is instructed not to ‘identify’ with the ‘clients.’ That is their lingo. But Gold is now merely the SW of herself. Before she slept we had a long gab, from cot to floor, floor to cot. I am in Angel’s Boy Scout sleeping-bag, which his mother pressed on me the night Gold came; it smells of boy, and woodsmoke. Gold, bending down at me, smells of her new hair. ‘You never did tell us—’ she says. ‘How you were orphaned. Why you had to live with your aunts.’

In my childhood, half the people in town knew some of it. Or thought they knew all of it. But once you turn yourself in, you are mostly a footnote. The facts are there, but in a public facility nobody much notices them. Still later on, from transfer to transfer, from a detention set-up to a medical one, public to private, the case-record fattens, the facts all but disappear. And the names—I had so many. But in any record, your conduct—the most recent—is what counts.

‘No. I never did say.’ I did tell the private hospital the trust could only half pay for what was owed. But their records are never revealed.

‘I know your father died in a war, Carol. I never told you, did I—that so did mine?’

‘Oh?’ The SW’s aren’t supposed to tell you, about themselves.

‘But about your mother, how she died … an army nurse, is all the record says. Let go, because of her relationship with a non-commissioned officer. When he was killed, his family’s long-time former employers took the child in.’

So they did. The town thought the aunts were misguided, if charitable. Or perhaps that, with no money except what they earned, I too would be indentured to the big ruin of a house that must be saved. Perhaps Titus, staring at me like an owl each time he came to deliver the coal, thought that too. When asked how his wife did he always answered the same. ‘Poorly. Ever since Hezekiah was los’.’ Though from well before the son was lost she had been known to be odd, finally retiring early from the library. I remember her, a light-skinned lady, a little mumbly, who no longer worked at the front desk. In the town there were a great many I would remember, with whom I was never to connect.

‘I knew about my father, of course. I would have had to.’ I see Gold’s eyelids flicker; she agrees, staring down at my face. ‘About my mother, I was only half-told. And not until I was half-grown. They thought it best.’

… That summer before I went off to college, Titus came for what was to be the last time before he died. By then I knew who he must be to me, but it was too late for either of us to remark upon it. ‘College?’ he said to my aunts ‘—that’s good. We none of us knew how much you had toward it, short of what’s needed for the house. But now she has the scholarship.’ The house was a monster, yet also half ancestor to him as well; he was in agreement that it had to be kept. Once the horse died I had grown indifferent to the old pile and its haze-filled barns, as the aunts knew. To my mind, I had no further stake in it. That was why I was told.

Until then, my mother had been a cipher. I could sneak a look at the man whose by-blow I had been admitted to be, in the line of dead soldier’s faces at the American Legion Hall. On Independence Day I sometimes had. And once on Memorial Day, when the parade ganging up to go to the cemetery had again opened up a hall off limits to kids except at events. That time I had even asked if I could help sell the poppies always sold on that day. ‘In Flanders Field, where poppies grow’—the poem was in our reader. Though that was not the war the face on the Legion’s photograph had fallen in, it seemed the thing to do. But the marshal I asked said, ‘Only veterans can sell them poppies, young lady. Got to wear one of those khaki hats, so’s people know.’ But then he reached over to a table for a bunch of those red cotton flowers and gave me one, for free. Maybe, looking at me had made a connection.

But of my mother—dead in childbirth, or vanished after?—no pictures, not even a name. ‘His family was willing for us to adopt you,’ was all the aunts ever said. And we sure wanted you. Now let’s rustle up the peanut butter sandwiches. ‘And have us a game.’

In senior high, by which time, in order to qualify for the normal legalities I was required to present a birth certificate on my own, it was revealed that an ‘infant’ had been born in a small town just inside the U.S. at the Canadian border, delivered by midwife to one Carol Smith, American, not otherwise described, the infant being christened the same. ‘Father not identified.’ Signed illegibly, in the midwife’s hand.

Color was not discussed in my aunts’ house, but mine was taken for granted by those who saw me there: a member of the town’s servant clan. When
Noblesse oblige
was murmured in my presence by a chance guest from one of the other turreted houses, and I asked later what that meant, Rosanna, the day aunt, rallied with, ‘To keep one’s obligations is noble,’ while Adelaide, who taught music to her evening classes, drummed on the table to the tune of
La Roi d’Yvetot.
As for me, no sooner did I show signs of knowing my lowly position in that household, than an extra blast of their love would knock me off my perch. I felt like the only surviving fish in the grand bowl in the sitting-room, swimming hither-thither to keep its place.

By my eighteenth birthday the house plainly needed young shoulders: roof-tiles whirling away in a nor’easter, foundation sagging in the warm. Neither aunt was now well; one might not last my college years, although this I was not told. Once graduated though, if I could teach? ‘Any subject of your choice,’ Adelaide said—‘Though I would not suggest music,’ Rosanna said. ‘And I would suggest—by day.’

The voices blend forever, over the tea napkins and special cakes—pink-icing’d squares I didn’t know were
petits fours—
that had meant decision-making ever since I could recall. ‘And if you could aim to teach in a college, for which we are told you have the capacity—what a tribute to your ancestors that would be.’

To Titus, and the sad, lavender-cheeked librarian? And my dim handsome father, not pictured anywhere in the house except in drawings I had done and kept hidden, or in pre-dream I narrated to myself?

The aunts knew my every expression, from the games always laid out for us in the bay. I have since been told, and I believe it, that this gaming was their own childlike expression of love.

‘Oh—the Oldfields?’ one said, the other adding ‘Of course. But not only them.’

Then who? What game is this?

The tea steams from the pot; we owned a Salton hot-tray given one year to steady savers at the bank.

‘My dearest.’

‘Dearest dear.’

I no longer try to piece out which of the aunts said which.

‘To those ancestors—’ both say, pointing, napkins in hand. Their faces flush, like when either of them wins at chinese checkers maybe, or even dominoes—but how can two win a game at the same time? ‘To those, dear, up there, on the wall.’

Their tribe crowds the sitting-room’s floss-flecked paper; I know every face, bearded or lace-capped, painted by an artist or photographed, and their legends as well. I know what a busk is and a peruke, and who brought home the ivories, all but two long since sold. The abolitionist minister, circled by four dead wives? The baggy Congressman who had deserted William Jennings Bryant and the free coinage of silver, just in time?—I know them all, the heritage of this house. Only, now they come down from the wall to me, gold frames, speckled ones, mourning banded ones, and the two silhouettes I cherish because no one knows who they are. One by one they are brought down and put in my hands, these ancestors. They are also mine.

‘Daisy—you still asleep?’

No, she is awake. ‘The rain.’ Pit-a-pat, autumn coming. Top of the fridge, the radio-clock glows. It’s any time, past time, I don’t want to know the time; tomorrow I’ll be gone.

‘I’ll tell you who my mother was,’ I say. ‘One of the aunts. But they would never say which one.’

The Shelter-Pak—its official name—is in the hall outside my half-open door. When you live with a backpack you are always looking for a clean place to set it down. The hall’s scrubbed linoleum is a palace rest-stop, compared to what that one will endure. For I’ll have a domestic life as much as any householder. Only of a different order. The search for running water being prime. After that the question of where you can lay your head. I have no grand theory on the adventures of the road. Except that in desert or oases, California or Niagara, the ground-rat knows early and best what the country’s coming to.

It helps to leave with an errand. Outside, it’s not light yet. Too early for those here who will be going out for milk—and coming back in. I can’t see the note on the fridge, but it is there. On her pallet, once mine, Daisy lies face down, her hair gleaming in the dim ray cast from the hall bulb; we got the color just right. Accepted—when Carmen brought her a mirror—with a weak smile.

My last night’s revelation sank into her like the dye. In former days she’d have cried out, like someone who’d found a lost key. In my own mind I continue speaking to her all the night through. Or to the eternal someone: grateful, that neither of them replies.

This is a new silence for me. In a head with a dialogue solely its own. The aunts have taken their enigma into the shadows behind me. My parents, whoever they were, have played out their variations. Gold has a hole in her where the children once were; it may never heal. I have no hole in me any more—its rim working like a mouth that wants a breast, its core of air sucking me toward the fatherless. My case is different; I was the child. Time will be my triumph. Whatever it brings.