Such Sweet Thunder (4 page)

“Aw.”

“Ivy Flakes presents: Mary Marvin! The story of a beautiful woman who tries to find happiness after thirty-five!”

“That sure is old!” He was full of sympathy for poor Miss Marvin.

“And now for our sensational announcement! We of Pocter and Kantrell are proud to present the newest and most extraordinary addition to our distinguished family of luxury soaps: Ivy Flakes Debutante! The newest …”

He resumed his search for goodies, looking in the purses in the chest of drawers for chewing gum. Instead of gum he found half a roll of Life Savers, and stuffed the whole half roll in his mouth.

Soft piano music. He paused and let it sweep his thoughts way out, beyond the circled light, beyond the southernmost limits of the polished floors and boiling clothes and fondled babies who did not belong to the black hands that caressed them.

And then
she
spoke, in a dulcet voice. The prettiest voice in the w-h-o-l-e world next to Mom’s! And then old Mary sighed a heavy sigh, over a letter, a love letter, in a garden reeking with the scent of roses, the announcer said. He said that a bird sat in a nearby tree and sang his heart out — Tweet! tweet! — mad with intoxication at the mere sight of her, suffering from unbearable pangs of jealousy, while she wondered why Geoffrey, the young, handsome, marriageable millionaire and heir to the Winthrop fortune, hesitated to ask her for that which she had already given to him a hundred times over — her hand, her heart, her soul!

Geoffrey ought to have his ass kicked! Shit! Amerigo stalked into the middle room. Mad, he made up the big bed, puzzling long and hard over the wine-red stain on Viola’s side of the bed. He tried to break ’er neck! The sheet trembled in his hands. When he had finished making up the bed, he hung the clothes up in the clothes closet and dusted the powder off the vanity dresser and emptied the ashtray, carefully laying the cigarettes aside against the day when his father might not have fifteen cents for a new package.

An organ flourish. He looked up with surprise, disappointed that he had not heard what had happened to Mary Marvin:

“Palm Oil presents! The story of the little suburban community of Five Points and Doctor Sweetridge, the parish priest, in his daily struggle to come to grips with the problems in a modern suburban community.” Then Amerigo and Dr. Sweetridge said:

“There is a destiny that makes us brothers,

“For none goes his way alone:

“An’ all that we send into the lives of others

“Comes back into our own.”

Organ flourish:

“And now, ladies, have you been wondering …”

He entered the kitchen and started to prepare his breakfast.

“When last seen, Kitty was talking to the notorious gangster known as the Hawk, trying to discover a clue that would lead her to Terry, who has been missing ever since he received the mysterious phone call from the unknown woman from the red house.…”

He ate his cornflakes and condensed milk diluted with water, and sugar, and bread and butter sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, and plum preserves.

He carried his cornflakes out onto the porch and sat down on the orange crate within the bright wedge of sunlight that fell across the outer corner of the porch. He surveyed his alley, the shoot and empty house next door, the backyards of the adjoining houses up and down the alley and those of Campbell Street.

Suddenly there was a burst of excitement streaming through the windows and the door of the Crippa kitchen. He was fascinated by the torrent of strange passionate words. “Momma! momma!” cried Tina, interrupting her mother. She was thirteen. Pretty brown hair. Sure mad about somethin’. Her teary speech was now partially drowned out by the sound of music.

“Midmorning Interlude!” the announcer was saying.

Meanwhile Tina spoke vigorously against the music. Then Carl, the youngest brother, joined in. He has a balloon-tire bicycle! His broken falsetto tones of rage tumbled into the midmorning sunshine, mingling now with:

“Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
, played by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra!”

Then suddenly the loud bang of a fist crashing upon the top of a table. Glasses and dishes rattled, spoons tinkled in cups. “Goddama! Basta! Baaaa — sta!” Silence, filled by the low wailing tones of a mournful clarinet. Mr. Crippa appeared at the back door with a huge
white towel in his hands, with which he dried his smooth massive face. A big, iron-gray mustache filled the space between his well-shaped nose and upper lip, which was almost completely hidden. Now he curled the tapered ends with his thumb and forefinger and rubbed with his giant hand the broad sweeping avenue of scalp that had once been adorned with rich, curly, chestnut-brown hair.

He talks so loud! Amerigo thought, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. Must take a g-r-e-a-t
big
pot of beans and fatback to fill
him
up from his feet to his head! A million dollars’ worth! He gazed with fascination upon the thicket of iron-gray hair that forced its way through the collar of his snow-white shirt.

Meanwhile Mr. Crippa looked with satisfaction out over his chest upon the yard and the house that he had rented to Rutherford and Viola, Aunt Lily and Unc, Miss Sadie and Mr. Nickles, Mr. and Mrs. Derby, to the bootleggers and Miss Anna and Monroe Benton on the first floor. He spied Amerigo looking at him with wide eyes.

“HALLO TONY!”

“He usta be a general!” Rutherford once said. “At least, that’s what Shorty says.”

“What Shorty?” asked Viola.

“Shorty! Aw, you know that li’l niggah, Babe!”

“I can’t place ’im.”

“A little buck-eyed niggah with his pants hangin’ down under his belly that usta flunky for Bernard when he had that gam’lin’ joint down on Fourth Street. Usta be sweet on Pretty Girl.…”

“Him? I thought he was Lucy’s ol’ man!”

“Maybe he was, I don’ know. But anyway, that’s him.”

“How does he know?”

“He’s flunkyin’ for the dagos, runnin’ hootch for ’um. He heard ’um talkin’. He says that the ol’ man was a general in the war. An’ after that he made a pile a dough off a black-market sugar to set ’im up in the States.”

Mr. Crippa turned into the kitchen and Mrs. Crippa opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch dressed in black. A quieter, calmer flow of conversation followed her. Mr. Crippa who reappeared in the door looked down upon her and replied now and then to her animated gesticulations with a low sympathetic growl. Her eyes twinkled and the finely wrinkled skin around her eyes and mouth expanded and contracted as she spoke. Gradually the talk and the faces faded out of mind, except that now Mrs. Crippa was approaching him.

“Eh Tony! Here! You wanna banana, eh? I geeva youa banana!” pressing a dark brown almost black banana into his hand.

“Throwitaway!” he imagined his mother’s voice whispering angrily. “Take it down an’ put it in the garbage can, an’ if she says anythin’ to you, you tell ’er I told you to do it!”
“Last week,”
she had said to Rutherford, “
she come givin’ ’im a box of cornflakes that the mice had messed in!
”

Mrs. Crippa entered the house and all was quiet, except for the unfamiliar music from the radio; it sounded like march music.

I wonder what they were talking about? he asked himself. Nobody got killed, so I guess they weren’t really mad. Maybe they talk like that because they eat a lot of tomatoes and drink wine all the time instead of water! He turned over in his mind the image of Mr. and Mrs. Crippa going every evening and sometimes during the day down to the basement with a large glass pitcher to get wine from one of the four huge vats. He remembered the tall stacks of red and white grapes that came every year. She always gives me big handfuls, and last year we stole a w-h-o-l-e lot, and ran around in the shoot and ate them, and squeezed them until the insides squirted out. He thrilled to the memory of the delicious sensation, and to the fear that had smitten him when he had faced Viola with his face and trousers all stained from the grapes:

“Boy! Where-in-the-w-o-r-l-d have you been?”

“Nowhere.”

“Did Mrs. Crippa give you those grapes?”

“Yes’m! You kin go an’ ask ’er!”

Now he smiled a faintly guilt-ridden smile of triumph as the memory of his mother’s voice faded. His eyes swept down upon the yard next to Mrs. Crippa’s where the vegetable garden was. Rose Marie, her daughter, lived there. Just got married to a fireman! A Irishman! Patrick Kelly! Pat, with a r-e-a-l pretty vegetable garden and a pretty new house that cost f-o-u-r t-h-o-u-s-a-n’ d-o-l-l-a-r-s!

“Must be true,” he had heard Rutherford say to Viola. “Shorty can’t be lyin’ about
that!
This is the depression. Who else can afford to buy a house like that in times like these?”

“The Farmer’s Bulletin!” said the announcer. “What are your problems, farmers? The weather? Predictions of …”

His glance took in the backyards that staggered in tiers down to the vacant lot just behind the row of buildings facing the avenue from which he now heard the rumble of a trolley and the large vague hum of traffic interspersed with the concerted sound of many voices. He
was surprised to hear the birds still twittering in the trees. Resting his elbow upon the banister he watched the sun shining through the branches of the elm trees into the lot of the empty house. Then he thought: It’s about time for them to be going through the shoot to go to school.

“That’s the way you’ll be goin’, too, pretty soon!” said Viola. “Then you won’ have to stay in the backyard all day by yourself no more while we’re at work. That’s the same way we went: through the avenue to Troost, an’ down Troost till you git to Belvedere Holla, an’ then through the holla to Fores’, an’ then straight down Fores’ till you come to the Field House.”

“Like when you go swimin’!” said Rutherford. And the hot sunny way opened up before his mind. He followed the burning path through the lot, past neat rows of foreign-looking redbrick and stone houses facing clean paved streets, cleaner than the alley, past the bars and cafés of “dago town” with benches outside filled with old men smoking little black cigars, wearing bushy mustaches like Mr. Crippa, and caps, and who like Mr. Crippa always talked excitedly, waving their hands in the air and speaking volleys of words he couldn’t understand. He saw the men sitting under maple and cottonwood trees, and others hovering excitedly around little wooden balls that they rolled along the hardpacked earth. Just like kids playing marbles! He saw along the way the neat little gardens like Rose Marie’s and Mrs. Crippa’s in the front yard of the houses with shallow flights of concrete steps that were covered — almost every one — with a white or green trellis decked with grapevines.

In the early autumn the grapes would swell on the vines and fill the air with a pleasant musky scent, they’d fall and squash upon the cement steps and in between the rows of fat round vegetables growing in the gardens.

The smell of grapes and autumn mixed with the smell of pureeing tomatoes spread out upon a large white breadboard in the sun. A world of fresh cold, crisp, ripe fruit passed before his mind and its aromas lingered in his nostrils. And then suddenly, miraculously, they became mixed up with all the impressions he had derived from his experience of the word
dago
.

“What’s a d-a-g-o, Dad?” he heard himself asking.

“An I-
ta
lian, you mean?”

“If they I-
ta
lians, why do they call ’um dagos?”

“For the same reason we’re Negroes and they call us niggahs!”

“How come?”

“ ’Cause we’re different.”

Two bumblebees shot into the bright beam of sunlight that blazed the path to Garrison School.

“Yes, sir!” said Rutherford. “After Labor Day you’ll be going to the kinnygarden! Ha! ha! Aw, m-a-n!”

“Under Miss Vi-o-la Chapman!” Viola added.

He followed the bee’s darting movements as their words registered upon his memory, and he began to imagine that it was they who spoke:

“Time sure flies, don’ it?”

“Yeah!” said Rutherford, “just think, me an’ your momma both went to Miss Chapman, an’ now you’ll be goin’ to ’er, too! An’ ol’ lady Moore! Ha, haa! That is a
mean
woman! Ooooooo-whee! What’s two times four she’d ask you, an’ you’d
better
know the answer! When you didn’ knowit, after she done explained it to you, she’d hit you ’cross the knuckles with that ruler. It had a rubber edge on it an’ h-u-r-t! An’ don’ cry! Better not cry! Ain’ I tellin’ im, Babe?”

“She was rough, all right.”

“Looked just like a white woman with long straight, coal-black hair. Kept it wound ’round the top of ’er head in a big coil like a thick black snake! Fastened with a big pretty comb made out a ivory …”

“Looked like a wig, Amerigo.”

“That wasn’ no wig, Babe!”

“Sure looked like one.”

“Anyhow, when you left that ol’ woman, an’ you wasn’ dead, you knowed somethin’, Jackson, let me tell you. Didn’ you, Babe?”

The little bee that looked like Viola nodded in the affirmative.

“She was just like Momma,” said Rutherford. “Hard but fair. An’ let me tell you somethin’ else …”

The bees suddenly darted into the shade.

“An’ let me tell you somethin’ else,” he was saying, “that Negro woman had c-l-a-s-s! I mean
dig
nified, like a queen!”

He tried to imagine going to school. A fragmentary image of Miss Chapman passed before his mind and he tried to imagine what she looked like. What someone looked like whom one had never seen but to whom one would have to go when one went to the kindergarten. A passionate feeling of love and devotion swelled in his breast as he exhumed the word:
Viola!

Maybe she’s my momma, too! And then he thought of Miss Moore. What’s a queen like? Something big, I bet. Like Grandma. He saw her riding through the night on Grandpa Will’s horse. Queen of hearts, diamonds, spades. The smooth face of Grandpa Rex came to mind, his fingers shuffling the queens on the playing cards that Rutherford kept in the drawer of the vanity dresser.

“How come,” he heard his voice interrupting his father’s speech. “How come Bra Mo and Miss Moore got the same name, an’-an’ she’s white, an’ he’s black?”