Marching to Zion (9 page)

When she was done, she dropped her hands and looked to her lap. She blushed and smiled, realizing that she’d just confessed her love to the object of her long-suffering, silent passion. She’d seen in his eyes the pain her story caused him and decided he loved her, too, in exactly the way she’d hoped. Then a voice rang through the room, ruining everything.

I’m dead now, am I?

It was the woman who’d opened the door. Minerva Fishbein had forgotten her. The sight, the smell, the touch of Magnus Bailey had driven the woman clear out of her mind. At the sound of her words, Minerva’s back went straight, her ears pricked.

My oh my, son. So this is the mischief you’ve been up to in town. Who is this crazy, ragamuffin child you’ve drug into my house? No wonder you came home to hide out a spell. If you think she’s stayin’ here, you’re as crazy as she is. She needs to leave. Before the people ’crost the hollow get wind of her and kill us all.

Bailey got up and patted the air with his hands.

Now, Mama …

Ma-ma, ma-ma. The two syllables struck Minerva Fishbein like blows. Slowly, the depth of Bailey’s betrayal sunk in. He’d lied to her. And it was an awful, ugly lie. He’d lied to her. And she’d poisoned her life on account of it. She’d been an idiot. A fool. Worse. She was too stupid to live.

She got up. She walked out the door. She walked down the road. Bailey followed her, begging her to stop, to listen to him just a little. She did not answer. He went back to the cabin, put on a jacket and shoes, borrowed a horse and wagon, and took off. When he caught up with his Minnie, she would not speak to him. He blocked her way, halted the horse, and got out, telling her to get into the wagon. She remained mute, but she stood still. He put his arms around her knees and back to pick her up. Her body had no resistance. She was a dead weight, as if drained of life, which made his task difficult. He banged her feet against the buckboard and her head against the top of the seat. Once set, she slumped over, not onto him, who was beside her, but to the opposite end so that she crumpled up in a heap. While all grew dark and cold around them, he shook the reins and drove her home.

When they came to the outskirts of Memphis, Bailey took a square of canvas from the back and threw it over the girl so no one would see he carried an insensate white woman beside him. He drove first to Thomas DeGrace’s house in Orange Mound, rousing the man and telling him to get in the rear of the wagon, they had urgent business to conduct. Sleepy but compliant, Thomas hastily dressed and did as he was told, not even taking the time to ask what in the world was going on. When he came awake from bouncing around in the back, he noticed his cousin was dressed in country clothes. What’s more, he was unkempt and bleary and gave off a troubling scent as strong as marsh mud in August. That unusual state alone was enough to spark a man’s curiosity. He reached forward and lifted a corner of canvas to see exactly what Bailey hauled in the dead of night.

Sweet Jesus! he said on catching a glimpse of the glazed eyes of Fishbein’s daughter. Where’d you find her? The old man’s near dead from worry.

She found me.

When they arrived at Fishbein’s house, Magnus Bailey told Thomas to get Miss Minnie up and out and escort her in. While he did so and amid the great clamor of her homecoming, Bailey slunk away like Judas into the night, leaving the horse and wagon in the other man’s care.

Before his daughter ran
away, the saddest man in the world could present himself as personable, even charming, if he had to. Otherwise, how could he make business? Business required he rise from his grave of memories for the time it took to strike a deal. How else could he pray with the minyan in the Pinch? Unless he shrugged at the kind of woes that afflicted Jews everywhere, the others would ask him why he thought his troubles were so special. Before his daughter ran away, he could sometimes take pleasure in a meal, a starry night, the softness of his sheets, and thank God for them all. Afterward, everything he touched, every sight before his eyes, every morsel of food turned to ash in his mouth. He considered her absence a fresh punishment for those small pleasures he’d allowed into his grieving, guilty heart. By the time she went missing a week, a malaise fiercer than any he’d experienced in the past gripped his heart and soul in its talons and squeezed them dry. Fishbein was a shell, a husk. Whispers were as shouts to him, the fairest breeze a gale. His clothing was a suit of mail studded with thorns.

And then Thomas DeGrace brought her home.

At first, he left the door unanswered. Hope had abandoned him. There seemed no point. But DeGrace was persistent. Holding Fishbein’s inert daughter in his arms, he battered the door so hard with his foot it seemed the thick oak would split. When at last the knob turned, he pushed his way in.

Fishbein staggered aside and cried out,
Mine kind! Mine kind!

Minerva’s eyes fluttered open at the sounds and smells of home. She parted her lips but no sound came forth. Fishbein wrung his hands while DeGrace carried Minerva to the parlor to lay her down on the humpbacked couch. He stood back while father and daughter were reunited in a blending of huddled, sobbing shapes.

It took a while, perhaps several days, but eventually Minerva told Fishbein everything that had happened to her, leaving out no detail of the calamities she’d met on the road. Her violation by the robber chief, her ejection from safe haven by the anti-Semite Deacon Brown, her hunger and the sufferance of all her wounds she reported flatly, as if she recited a household shopping list. To hear her tell the tale, her tribulations were no more than inconveniences. Throughout, her eyes were dull and stared ahead. Until she came to her arrival at Tulips End, Fishbein feared her experiences had numbed her completely, that she was beyond repair. Then she tried to tell him of Magnus Bailey’s deceptions.

It turned out, she said, that Ma … Ma … Ma …

Her mouth twisted uselessly. She could not utter his name. First she swallowed her lips, then she jutted them out. She stretched out her neck. She tried again.

Ma … Ma … Ma …

Her hand went to her throat, where the name was trapped. Her nails clawed at her skin. Fishbein grabbed her hands and held them fast before she could draw blood.

Magnus, he said, softly. Magnus.

And she nodded vigorously. Suddenly, her eyes were on fire.

Yes! Yes, Papa. He betrayed me, he betrayed me! His mama is alive! He lied to me! He ran away!

She burst into a flood of tears, howling like a beast of the field. For a few moments, Fishbein was hopeful. If she can weep like that, he thought, perhaps she will heal. But after she stopped, she withdrew inside herself to a place so deep, she drifted through the house like a being without substance, a dark angel or a ghost.

Over the next weeks, it became increasingly doubtful whether Minerva or her father would recover from the catastrophe of her heart’s compulsions. Minerva’s tutors were turned away at the door. The piano gathered dust. There were no trips to the haberdasher or to the bank. Fishbein spent his days in grief. He forsook even the
shul. Rather than attend the daily minyan, he sat at home, shoeless, sitting on a stool as if in mourning, reading Lamentations and the Book of Job. After a number of weeks, the rabbi and president of the Baron Hirsch Synagogue visited him to implore him to return to the fold. He did not allow them inside. Dinah, the cook Thomas DeGrace had installed in their home after a long search for a woman who’d worked in Jewish households before and could manage a kosher kitchen, was full of complaints.

Them two just don’t eat! she told him. For him maybe a little soup if I ask pretty and often. For her a piece of bread from time to time. I swear she likes it best dry and old and hard as rock candy. Even on the Sabbath neither one will eat more than an egg or an itty-bitty bite of chicken. It won’t be long ’fore they both keel over, and I will not have folk say that two adult human bein’s in my care died from starvation! I’m tellin’ you, Thomas. Either they start eatin’ or I quit!

Time went by. Dinah quit.

The old man continued to provide DeGrace a weekly stipend for the management of his business, but he no longer bothered to pretend an interest in lumber supplies. DeGrace pressed Fishbein to sell the concern, making himself a healthy commission once he found a buyer, and then he quit his service also. He might have stuck around the Fishbeins for the easy cash, but the girl’s glowering stares unnerved him. He was afraid she might build up enough steam to ask him one day about his cousin, Magnus Bailey, who had plain disappeared. His own mama didn’t know where he was. DeGrace resented Minerva for that.

Father and daughter settled into a desolate life. They went out as little as possible. What they needed was delivered to their back door by the lackeys of tradesmen. Minerva took over from Dinah in the kitchen. Twice a week, she telephoned the grocer, the butcher, the laundry, the coalman and iceman and ordered whatever they required. Afterward, she sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, immersed in her regrets, waiting for deliveries made by Negroes whose faces and bodies she scanned for resemblance to her lost love. When one of these chanced to have the same shade of skin or shape of hand, a gold tooth, perhaps, at just that spot revealed by only the widest smiles, or best of all eyes with any green in them, she took her time telling the man where to lay his burdens down, and took more time in paying him, maneuvering her movements that she might brush against him for an instant and feel, once again, alive. Naturally, she developed a reputation amongst them of a woman to fear or to mock. Watch out for that redheaded gal, the old hands warned new hires. She’s lookin’ for somethin’ that’ll get some poor boy killed one day. Or: That skinny l’il thing is moonbat crazy. A man could blow her over with a single breath, have his way, and be out of town ’fore she opened her eyes and begged for mercy.

There was a colored man sent to fix a leak in the pipes under the kitchen sink who came close to taking advantage of her. There was not much Magnus to him, except that he spoke well and in a voice that reminded her of Bailey’s rich baritone. She got up close to him while he worked, getting on her knees and peering under the sink, asking him questions about the function of wrenches and O rings, just to hear him talk. He worked on his back, glancing over at her from time to time. When his leg nudged her own, she leaned into it, and he smiled. He was reaching out to find some part of her flesh to touch when Fishbein came into the room. Minerva got up quickly before her father noticed anything. The man finished his work. He drew up a bill and she wrote a check to his boss. After he left, she discovered he’d written something in a margin of the bill.
Big Sam’s Bar on Beale Street,
it said,
most any night.

Months went by. Seasons changed. Out of the blue, Minerva started eating. She filled the house with the scents of cabbage, potatoes, and onions, groats and noodles. On Fridays, she baked challah and prepared soup glistening with chicken fat, fish salads, beef, and cinnamon dainties. Infected by her change of mood, her father ate too. One day in the middle of the week, she hired a cab and went downtown by herself, coming home with bobbed hair and a dozen boxes of dresses, hats, stockings, and shoes. Fishbein didn’t know what to make of her transformation, especially the shortened skirts, the painted lips, the boldly colored flowers and feathers that sprang from her hatbands, but it strengthened his miserable heart to see her take an interest in her appearance again. He considered going back to shul, put away Lamentations, and took up Psalms.

Thomas DeGrace had gone on with his life. He filled his time and pockets with pre-Fishbein pursuits: card playing and cockfights, cadging money from rubes and dockworkers to invest in one grand scheme or another. He combed the juke joints up and down the Mississippi for the guitar pickers and blues singers he brought to Memphis, depositing them on whatever free corner Beale Street offered up that they might audition for passersby and build a reputation the bars could not ignore. Most nights after midnight, he could be found collecting his commission from their handouts.

One night he was doing just that when he heard a scuffle in an alleyway. This was nothing unusual in that neighborhood at two in the morning. He tried to ignore it rather than put his nose in where it didn’t belong, as he liked his nose just where it was—on his face. But a voice called out above the thumps and grunts. At the sound of it, every hair on his neck stood up. The voice was familiar, feminine, its tone frantic. Thomas DeGrace, it said, help me!

He turned and peered down the dark depths of brick corridor stinking of booze and horse piss. Two hulking black men battled over the favors of one of the town’s more adventurous whores, a white, red-haired floozy in a skirt that exposed her legs above her powdered knees. She wore black lace garters and red pumps. A lamp outside Big Sam’s exit door illuminated a face painted heavily as a clown’s. It was Minerva Fishbein.

Thomas! Thomas DeGrace! Help me! she said again, extending her hand. Her black-ringed eyes were beggar’s eyes. He could not resist them. He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her away. Together they ran fast as they could from men too drunk and bruised-up to follow very far. At the river walk, he shoved her inside a shack he knew that sold stolen goods during the day and kept itself quiet as a churchyard at night. Panting, trying to catch her breath, she shrunk against a wall and stared at him. He paced back and forth in front of her, trying to think up what to say. This took some time.

Does your father know what you’ve been up to? he blurted at the end, earning himself a short, bitter laugh in response.

How long has this been goin’ on? he asked next.

She shrugged.

Oh, Miss Minnie. What would Magnus Bailey say? he tried at last.

I don’t know what Magnus Bailey would say. There was a kind of poison in her tone although her eyes teared at the name.

Thomas DeGrace continued to pace. His arms slashed through the air in sharp, useless gestures.

I do. It would break his heart to see you like this. Why, he’d take you by the scruff and drag you home to lock you up.

Minerva Fishbein tossed her head. No, he wouldn’t. He was a coward. I know braver men now.

He clucked his tongue and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, wondering what to do. Her lips curled into a pout. She stepped up good and close to him. He went still.

You helped me out tonight, Thomas. Whoever won that fight would’ve cut me just for fun. There somethin’ I can do for you? She spoke in a dark, throaty purr, which frightened him more than a bucket of spiders. Then she draped her arms around his neck.

He broke away from her. She gave him a scornful grin, smoothed her skirt, squared her shoulders, and left him there, distraught, confused, and alone.

After that night, he’d run into her plying her trade from time to time, always in the early morning hours. He kept an eye on her, although they rarely spoke. Sometime during that summer, she disappeared as thoroughly as Magnus Bailey. When he asked around for L’il Red, as she’d come to be known, no one knew where she’d gone, though many murmured her name wistfully and wished her back home to Beale Street, where she belonged.

It was a good year before she turned up, heavier, harder, and full of new angles on the flesh game. She bought a house on South Third and dressed it up in velvet curtains and chandeliers, hired an eighty-eighter, two bartenders capable of keeping the peace, and half a dozen girls fresh from the backwater and full of juice. She taught them everything she knew about men. Folk said she had a silent partner, the moneyman, a handsome degenerate from an old Memphis family with too much time on his hands. L’il Red’s was a big success. Thomas DeGrace passed her establishment nearly every night on his way to his usual haunts. More than once, he considered stopping in just to see how she got on, but he didn’t.

There was a barbershop downtown that catered to coloreds, Uncle Pete’s, and this was a place where DeGrace took a shave and a shine whenever he was feeling flush. Since he was a good tipper, old Pete took messages for him on his telephone and allowed him to make calls for a small fee. After he’d run a particularly profitable craps game the night before, DeGrace went to Uncle Pete’s for the shave deluxe that came with a neck massage. Old Pete greeted him with uncommon urgency.

Thomas! Thomas! The barber was so excited to see him, he wrapped a steaming-hot towel around a customer’s face tighter than he should. The man squealed.