Keeping Secrets (28 page)

1972

The summer-evening streets were still and empty. The frame houses in this older part of town were beginning to show their age, but then, Jake thought, what wasn’t?

New houses were going up out past the Northside, out in what used to be the country, columned mini-Taras with wide yards full of St. Augustine sod. But here, close to the river, close to town, such as it was, steps sagged, chimneys tilted. The freeway was coming right through the middle of it for those who were in a rush to get from where they’d been to where they were going. The folks who lived in its path had to be in a hurry, too, to relocate. Their houses stood empty now, abandoned. Once people were gone, Jake thought, how quickly their houses gave up, dropping shutters and screens and sashes as easily as a fresh widow strewing hairpins, girdles, all pretense of caring.

Jake wiped his brow. The night was hot and close, nothing stirring except air conditioners, window fans. He thought of Emma. She had always hated this August heat.

“Rich people go away in August,” she’d announced once at the table when she was quite young. She’d read that in a book. And then she’d gone away for far longer than a month to Atlanta, New York, California. There were two whole summers full of postcards from Europe once. For a long time, the bad time, she hadn’t written much. But then those postcards. He had them all in a scrapbook. His Emma, flying to all the places he had only dreamed of, had never been to, writing back about museums and wines and foods he’d never heard of as if she had been traveling forever.

And here he was, still here, walking these same streets, in this same hick town where nothing was ever going to move or change, except to grow older, or hotter, or colder.

Something had been different this evening, however, something that upset Jake enough to have him talking to himself now as he walked the two miles home from the Ritz.

“Cheating,” he said aloud to himself. “Said I was cheating. I never cheated anybody in my whole life.”

He crossed the intersection of North Fourth and Bienville without looking—which was no real danger. It was almost eleven o’clock. Most everyone in West Cypress had been sleeping for hours.

Jake muttered to himself, “Maybe Rosalie’s right. Maybe people are jealous of you when you’re good. And I
am
good at dominoes. But that’s no reason for Mr. Vance to get huffy. I’ve been beating him for years.”

Jake pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his brow again and the top of his bald head. Walking through the August night air was like walking on the bottom of a tub of hot water.

“Maybe the heat’s getting to him. Goddamned heat. Getting to me. Accusing me of cheating.”

What he didn’t remember was that he’d been sitting through the game with the double five in his lap. It was when he played it that Joe Vance had snapped. He’d warned Jake five or six times in the past few months that he had to stop that. Jake remembered neither the cheating nor the warning. To his mind, none of it had ever happened.

Now Jake cut back over to River Road, which wound by the side of the Coupitaw, a seawall and then a levee separating the two all along the way.

It wasn’t the most direct route, this toing and froing, but though his memory of the immediate past was fading, he remembered what Emma had said to him the last time she was home. “Daddy, you miss the fun of it, always doing it the same way. I know Momma tells you there’s a
right
way, the
only
way. But that’s crazy. You’ve got to learn to meander.”

There was some truth in that. Rosalie had patterns and rules for everything, from washing dishes to mowing the lawn. He hadn’t given in to them at first, he’d been angry all the time, but in the long run it was easier. But Emma hadn’t. She always amazed him, Emma. How had she grown up to be so smart? And not just about books.

Emma. He smiled into the summer night, and his leapfrog memory, which was much more comfortable with decades than with yesterday, took a big jump.

Why, it seemed like only yesterday that he was standing in the kitchen of the old apartment, the one behind the store, trying to place an order to a wholesaler on the phone.

That black instrument was like a king snake. It didn’t matter how many times Rosalie told him that the telephone was harmless, that he ought to be able to face it unafraid. He picked it up and it turned on him. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth with terror.

“And a sack of p-p-p…”

He couldn’t get it out. His stutter kept the word inside as tightly as if it had turned the lock and thrown away the key. His face was red. He could just imagine the face of the woman on the other end, not even having to hide her grin, waving other people in her office over to listen to the popcorn sounds on the telephone.

The more he struggled, the more he resented Rosalie’s insisting he do this. “You could at least place the orders, Jake. Do I have to do everything?”

He started over. “A sack of p-p-p.”

Three-year-old Emma had been sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, playing with a bowl of cold oatmeal she’d refused to eat. “Potatoes!” she yelled suddenly in her high fluty voice. “Potatoes! Potatoes! Potatoes!”

“Potatoes!” Jake had echoed her into the phone, as if
p’s
weren’t an obstacle as tall as Mount Everest.

And when he’d hung up, she’d stood up on her chair and held her arms out to him, crowing at their triumph. He’d picked her up and hugged her to him.

He’d never had a problem with
that
word again. And “potatoes” had forever after been their running joke.

Ah, Emma. He missed her so. Why did she have to go?

Well. He knew the answer to that. She’d have suffocated in West Cypress. But he doubted that she had ever looked back; she had inherited his roving eye.

Not for love, no, he didn’t mean that. And he didn’t know anything about Emma’s boyfriends since Bernie. It would have embarrassed him to ask. It seemed like prying. And Emma didn’t volunteer.

No, he’d meant his yen for places.
New York
. He could close his eyes, and the towers of Manhattan glowed before him in the night sky.
California
. Beautiful warm California. San Diego. Ah, those sweet brief Navy days; he could never forget that bay. All that blue. Even the Dodgers were in California now. They had known a good thing when they saw it.

Though—he laughed a little to himself—Emma never saw it their way. She had never forgiven the Dodgers for deserting Brooklyn, moving to LA. Like her daddy, she’d been a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan.

All those summer afternoons they’d listened together, the announcer’s voice flying high as a home run when Campanella hit one over the fence. There was no other sound in the world like that of a baseball game. “A high fly ball,” and he and Emma would groan together on afternoons as hot as this very one had been. Emma would dance in front of the radio, cheering her Dodgers on with the pennant they’d brought back from Coney Island when she was almost six years old.

Yet when the Dodgers moved, she’d turned her back on them, switched off the radio or put her fingers over her ears. As far as she was concerned, they were dead.

“Just like Baby Snooks,” she’d said.

Her beloved Baby Snooks. She’d been about five then. He’d told her that the newspaper said Fanny Brice was gone.

That was okay, Emma said, but Baby Snooks would still be on the radio.

“Fanny Brice
is
Baby Snooks,” he’d explained.

“No.” She understood about actors and characters, but she refused to accept this particular truth.

She sat by the radio that night, waiting for her show. Her face was expectant, about to burst into a gleam of “I told you so.” She
knew
that Baby Snooks couldn’t die. Baby Snooks was her favorite, better than chocolate ice cream.

When the hour arrived, there was no explanation, just a new program of recorded music played in Baby Snooks’s place as smoothly as waters closing over a spot.

Emma had raced sobbing out of the room, had been inconsolable for days. And then suddenly it was over. She turned a cold face toward his and said, “Baby Snooks is dead.”

“The Dodgers are dead,” she’d said with that same face, but no tears.

It had scared him a little, the way she could close down her heart. She could just turn it off.

In high school. “She lied about me,” she said about Linda, her until-then best girlfriend. And never mentioned her name again.

Jake didn’t know how it had gone for her much after that. Except for whatever it was she had decided about Bernie, once it was done, it was over.

Well, that was how life was, wasn’t it? Things were done. They were over. That was that.

Just then Jake came to the place by the river where he and Mr. Beasley used to go fishing. Suddenly, without having thought about it, he found himself standing on top of the levee, which was covered with long grass.

The moon was bright enough for him to see the outlines of the trees below, where the bank sloped into the water. There was the little dock down there where Mr. Beasley, a neighbor and an acquaintance of his and Rosalie’s from church, had fished before he got impatient behind a truck on Highway 80 and turned himself to mush.

Jake always wondered about that. He remembered the man talking about the hardware business he’d retired from and about how after that the days had seemed so long. He said that each one stretched on and on for years, that he felt like he was just marking time, waiting to die. Jake wondered whether he’d just gotten tired of waiting.

He looked down at the black water, far down beyond the trees.

If Jake could have forced his tongue to talk to Mr. Beasley, to say what was on his mind, he’d have said this: If you let them, the days flow. They flow one into the other, on and on, just like the Coupitaw. Sure, there are snags. Like Rosalie fussing at him, wanting something, but you can stop that with silence. If you’re quiet, eventually, they all go away and leave you alone and the days continue flowing. When you get really good at it, you can go off into little turns in your mind, like Emma’s meanders. You can go and spend the day somewhere. You can sit on the front stoop in Baltimore and listen to the kids playing stickball up the block.

He took a last look down at the black and moon-spangled water, raised one hand and waved to the memory of Mr. Beasley, scrambled back down the levee and across River Road, and then, instead of following it two more blocks toward home, he looked back over his shoulder and made a sudden left turn.

It was time for another meander, though he didn’t know whether he could call this deviation from the straight and narrow path back home to Rosalie a meander, since he’d been doing it for over twenty years.

It was more like an ox-bow lake, a pool of still water that had once been a curve in the river until the current got tired of going around the long way and cut on through the shorter distance and left the lake behind.

That’s what Hattie was to him. A pool of still water that the rush of other people’s lives had left behind. And when he bathed in her waters, sometimes literally, because she liked to get into her tub with him and take turns scrubbing backs, he felt like there was nowhere in the world he’d rather be. But as the years had passed, that wasn’t quite as easy as it once had been.

“We gone have to stop eating or get a bigger tub,” she’d laughed just last week.

But then, after they’d had their bath and were done with their loving, she’d put a whole sweet-potato pie topped with whipped cream on the table in front of them anyway. And they dug right in. Finished the whole thing, along with cups of light coffee sweetened with a big tablespoonful of sugar.

Hattie was the most wonderful cook.

Thinking about her made his mouth water.

Well. One more block and he’d be there.

The blocks weren’t quite as regular here in the Quarters as they were in the rest of town. The streets still weren’t paved, and when it rained they were a mess.

Years ago, when he first started with Hattie, she’d told him he was going to have to be careful of his shoes. If he went home full of mud, Rosalie would know he’d been walking the Quarters and want to know why on earth he’d come that way.

So he changed into his galoshes whenever the weather was bad.

He left them in a bread sack under a bush of pampas grass—
pompous
grass, Emma called it as a little girl—right at the Quarters’ edge. The pampas would cut you to ribbons if you weren’t careful. No one would go bothering with his shoes in there.

Of course, everyone in the Quarters knew that that was where Mr. Jake left his shoes, and that he came back and got them when he and Hattie were through—but Jake didn’t know that.

Tonight he didn’t have to worry about mud. It had been dry for almost three weeks. The clouds had been rolling in every afternoon and hovering heavy like a tease, but nothing happened. It was getting to be a drought.

He was still thinking about the weather when he reached Hattie’s house. It looked like all the other houses in the Quarters, wood frame, four-roomed, a little front porch and a tinier one behind. No sooner had he set foot on Hattie’s front step than she opened the screen door.

“Hi, sugar,” she said in her deep voice. It was like cane syrup pouring out into the dark.