The Freedom in American Songs (11 page)

“Leon?” Eleanor strode over to him. “We need to talk outside.” She dragged him out through the front door, Leon patient and forbearing.

Darlene kicked her boots off, dug her knees in my cushions made of sari silk, and jammed her face between the curtains. “They're huddled on your steps having some sort of a …”

From upstairs came a drawn-out and bloodcurdling scream.

“… confab … what the hell?”

A thumping and continued screaming as Joey hurtled downstairs holding one arm, the skeleton on his sweater staining with blood. I caught him. At the top of the stairs loomed Adam Corlett, grasping the missing knife.

“He
move
d
!” Adam's exaggerated eyebrows said,
This is far from my fault …

The front door opened and Eleanor and her brother came back inside. Leon looked up carefully at Adam Corliss and said, “Ramo Samee?”

Adam nodded.

“The famous Indian knife-thrower?”

“Best in the world.”

“… He missed.”

“I
told
Joey not to move.” Adam's was the plaintive voice of one who has always been misunderstood.

Darlene extracted her red phone and with red nails clicked 911. “What street number are we?”

“4137.” I pulled the blood-soaked wool away from Joey's skin—his blood staining the white bones on his sweater skeleton. I looked down the neck-hole. Blood seeped but did not gush from his shoulder.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me,” said Darlene into her phone. She snapped it shut.

“Is the ambulance coming?” I asked her.

“They said to take him there ourselves.”

“What?”

“They asked was he breathing. They asked if he was conscious. If he's breathing and conscious they said we have to take him ourselves unless we want to wait an hour and fifteen minutes. Jesus H. Christ what are they driving, tricycles?”

“My Mazda's at Tyrone's Autobody,” I said, “having a new timing belt put in.”

“I'll call Casino Taxi,” Darlene started dialing.

“No.” Eleanor stepped into the midst. She stared at Adam as she told her brother, “Leon, go get Ed. Tell him to bring the car. Tell him Joey's hurt and he has to get here right away. Tell him his ghost did it.” Adam stared back at her with an expectant expression that stopped just short of being a smirk. Leon went out and Eleanor got ice, lay Joey on the couch with his shoulder higher than his heart, and applied pressure. She made me give her a wooden spoon and the belt off my dress.

“What do you mean,” I asked her, “his
ghost
?”

She manipulated the spoon against Joey's shoulder and tightened my belt around it. It was a pale blue, plastic belt, a half-inch wide, and had never been anything but decorative until now.

“Ed's ghost,” she nodded toward Adam Corlett, “is what I call that kid. Always outside our house, doing circus tricks. Time and time again I used to call out to Ed and say, hey, look at the kid juggling, or on his stilts, or tossing balls around like a seal. Ed never came to the window. Then, one time, he finally came and looked, but he said he couldn't see the kid. He was right there, and Ed said he couldn't see anyone.” Adam had slid halfway down the staircase, his back to the wall, and now watched Eleanor, subdued, waiting.

“Is that,” he nodded at her improvised contraption with the belt and spoon, “a tourniquet?” He appeared only slightly interested, as if he'd heard of tourniquets but had not seen one made. Nothing in him suggested he felt responsible for or even slightly connected to the appearance of this example. The door burst open and Ed Dickson, furious, took in the scene on the couch then searched and fixed his sight on Adam, who at the moment Ed saw him abruptly flushed with vitality, his face pink with a white streak as his own blood infused his face and he shouted at Ed, indignant and familiar, “Don't blame
me
—I didn't do it on purpose!”

Ed Dickson had invisible restraints binding his arms and legs, which strained against an impulse to which the room itself, its walls and light fixtures and the mantel piece looking on with disguised calm, knew he must not give in. Adam flattened himself against the wall, its cold plaster his witness and support. The other walls shrank imperceptibly, distancing themselves—there was a surplus of stillness in the room. But emotion had escaped both father and secret son: they had not ceased glaring at each other. Ed Dickson didn't know where else to look, and Adam stared at the one thing he wanted to see above all others—his father's face, full of feeling directed completely at him, Adam.

“Ed?” Eleanor said to her husband.

Adam Corliss's chin crumpled. He began to cry. He hung his head and ran and slammed it against his father's ribs and he held onto Ed Dickson and sobbed. Ed looked down at the boy's head against his golf shirt that had embroidered on it one of those little animals—a fox or a crocodile—I forget which creature, and he did not embrace the boy. Eleanor kept her eyes on her husband's face, but he would not look at her. I tried to see Ed and Adam through her eyes in that instant—Adam tearful and butting his gold hair pitifully into Ed's shirt, wetting it—and to understand what, if anything, Eleanor must now know, but it was hard to discern.

“The ghost,” Eleanor had called Adam. Had she said
Ed's
ghost? Had she seen the way Ed Dickson had looked at Adam when he stormed in—looked
through
Adam—with a fury that comes only out of connection deeper than any knife wound? If she had any dignity, would Eleanor Dickson not now gather her forces and breathe deeply before arranging to have the locks changed and her husband sent quietly to one of those grey-furnitured basements in Bedford or Lower Sackville where disgraced husbands go to live on Tony's Donairs until they meet a new and unsuspecting woman?

But it was difficult to read.

“Ed?” said Eleanor again.

She was a woman who'd grown up with an unstable brother and, I remembered her hinting, an alcoholic father: a woman who knew the world was full of unpredictable forces underlying any matter at hand. Eleanor Dickson was an expert at reminding people of the correct order of proceedings in any catastrophe. She kept her hair composed in a bobbed helmet ready for battle, serviceable during parent-teacher meetings or collapsing circus tents. But under it, I watched fall apart the red and cream lumps of her face. I glimpsed furniture and other large pieces of equipment being shifted within the darkness of her watchful eyes—stagehands clad all in black moved silently in that darkness rearranging her set. To us they were nearly invisible, but Eleanor knew their footfalls, their names, and the exact position of each tread as they surreptitiously rearranged everything in there, everything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His Brown Face Through the Flowers

 

 

They had strung lights
along the seafront in different shapes: stars, moons, diamonds, and they had openly said it was to cheer the people up. Francine had come home from Canada to be near her father. Her father had been ready to die. Now he had died, the funeral was over, and Francine was faced with the smallness of England for two more weeks until the date on her plane ticket. This was in 1986, and Francine was fifty-two. Lydia, her childhood friend, and Katie from her teenage years, had begged her to stay at their houses. They had been her maid and matron of honour. But she was going to stay in her father's flat and clear it out for whoever moved in next. He would have wanted that. She had cleared out the cupboards, the closets and the drawers, and she had scrubbed the flat. She had given the curtains and the china away to people who had come to the tea she had given after the funeral. She had had no sisters or brothers. Her mother was dead. Francine was the only one left. So if Lydia's mother had seen the china cups at the funeral tea and said, “My, these cups are nice Francine. What are you going to do with them when you go?” why not give them to her? Lydia's mother had eyed the flat then. It was bigger than her own, and she wondered about being put on the waiting list for people who were eligible to live in it. The smallness of England, Francine had thought again, and it was the first time she had come back and not wished to stay forever.

After the funeral tea she had gone to the telephone box at the top of Mile-End Road to call the Houses Cleared numbers advertised in the
Gazette
. She called two. One said he would come now, and one said he would come in the morning.

The first one was a young Asian who wore nice clothes and smiled. He was good-looking. She showed him the furniture. It was shabby except for two pieces: a writing table and a chest of drawers.

“I will give you a hundred pounds.”

“Well, I'll consider your offer. I'll compare it with the others and I'll let you know.”

“You have others coming to see you?” He looked hurt. “Why? Do you not believe I am giving you a good price?”

“I want to compare prices, that's all. I'll let you know if yours is best. I have to do the best I can.”

“I will tell you what I will do.” Every word precise and meticulous. He gesticulated with an elegant brown hand. She caught a faint and lovely scent. “I will give you a hundred and ten and I will clear the house of everything.” He floated his hand toward the shabby couch and the chairs with their knees shining through the upholstery, “and that way you will not have to pay the council twenty pounds.” Her friends had said she might have to pay the twenty pounds. Still, she did not relent.

“I'll see what the other people say and then I'll call you back.” He went away then, graciously.

The next morning a fat man with greasy curls came to the door. He wore a shirt whose top button remained undone. Curls of hair showed. He wore a gold necklace, and bracelets and rings. He was a local, a northerner. They had been having record-high temperatures and he was sweaty. She showed him around.

“I'll give you twenty for that,” he pointed to the chest of drawers, “and fifty for that,” the writing table, “six for them and two for that.” It added up to a hundred and eight pounds. She thanked him and told him she would let him know. He went out as if he didn't care.

In the afternoon she went to her father's tiny garden to gather silver dollar plants. He had not planted anything—glaucoma had made him blind—but seeds had drifted from someone else's patch and taken root, as if the seeds knew that she, who had gardened ever since she married, were coming to visit them. She had discovered them before the funeral and had been picking and peeling them. Peeled, they were tall stems decorated with shimmering pearl-coloured circles, and she had filled the room with them and given a bunch to everyone who had come to the funeral tea. There were still more in the garden. She had gathered an armload and was ready to take them inside, when the elegant first man appeared.

“What did he give you?” He did not appear insistent somehow. He seemed to be doing something he had promised her he would do, and she liked him for it. Not like the fat one dividing everything into bits.

“It was very similar to yours.”

“Did he say he would clear the house of everything?”

“No.”

“Well I will do it. I will give you a hundred and ten pounds and I will clear the whole house and you will not have to pay the council.”

“All right.”

“Good.” She felt he said this word to her, not to himself as the other one would have done. She told him to come tomorrow.

That evening she wandered around the rooms drinking a glass of brandy that she kept replenishing from the flask she had hidden in the bathroom. The flask was left over from the funeral tea. Everybody had wanted the whiskey. There was a package of cigarettes in her purse too. She had never smoked. But there was the strain and the loneliness of the flat, and Lydia's telling her, “I couldn't get along without my menthols. Only the odd one mind you.” So she had bought a pack of menthols. But these in her purse now were not menthol. She had graduated almost immediately to the real thing. With the curtains gone and the light on, she held her cigarette below the sill so her sons and daughter could not see it from their own windows across the Atlantic. Lydia was right. Cigarettes were great company. But she had not expected them to burn away so fast. You had to keep lighting one after another. And these were the longest you could get. Benson and Hedges. She would throw the pack away as soon as she got to the airport.

She rolled up the good sleeping bag that covered her father's bed and put it under her own bags. There were a couple of pictures on the walls. She took these down and tucked them in the same place. She even took the nails out in case they attracted his attention. She could give these things to people she cared about.

When he came the next day he looked around. “My, you are organized.” But that was all he said. He counted out the money, “One hundred and ten,” and gave it to her. There was a huge skinhead with him. She had been wondering how he would move everything. They began. Francine stayed in the middle of the living room, sitting on a cracked stool peeling silver dollars. A pile of them lay unpeeled near her left foot, and a peeled pile glimmered near her right. She had loved her father.

She looked up when they had gone downstairs for about the sixth time. There was a little carved night table left, painted black, and behind the door a big vase of artificial flowers that must, she thought, have been put there by one of the home help workers in a futile attempt to brighten the room. The vase of flowers was something she had thought about saving, but because it was so unwieldy, and because she loved real flowers, she had left it alone. She wondered if he would try to take it. He came back alone, picked the little night table up and stood there.

“That is it then,” his modulated tones reached inside her like music. “And now you have a nice trip back to Canada.” He inclined his head toward her, gracious and polite, yet somehow reassuring. As he approached the door he scooped the vase of flowers in his free arm, and then he went out.

He was unconscious of her watching him through the doorway. He had to stop and turn around the banister at the top landing. His arm encircled the vase and she could see his brown face through the flowers. Then there was just the banister.

She went to Lydia's house the day after that, with the sleeping bag and the pictures. The small house was full of people; Lydia's husband, their eldest daughter and her little boy and husband, their youngest daughter, and Lydia's mother. The youngest daughter was fifteen but Francine thought she looked like a little girl because she was wearing white socks and a skirt and her knees were knobbly. Fifteen-year-olds in Canada didn't look like that. They had a tea for her. Salmon buns, sausage rolls, cheese scones and lettuce and tomato. Trifle and chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie. Hot tea and milk and sugar and chocolate biscuits. The husbands were out of work. Lydia was taking a course in computers and cookery, and so was her husband. Francine's other friend Katie had told her these courses were just a limp go by an impotent government at raising people's hopes and nobody was fooled. Katie was working for the Labour party now, and she had a candidate's photograph in her living room window. That was another thing that was different. Francine had not thought Katie would ever join any sort of group.

The tea was lovely but Francine felt as if everyone in the small house was trapped. She kept longing to draw a deep draught of fresh air. She had been wanting that ever since she had come home. Maybe it was the heat. She felt her friends were hanging on to everything she told them, as if they imagined she held a key they did not hold. And when she told them about the man who came to clear her father's house, they wanted to know whom she had found. She described him. She told them how nice he was, how she had liked him. None of them knew whom she could have called. Then one of the husbands figured it out. “Oh,” he said, “she means the Paki from Dean's Road.”

Everyone's curiosity was satisfied, and they went on talking as before the terrible price of everything, how bad unemployment was getting, the smallness of England, how many foreigners there were now. And still they looked at her with that trapped expression that had an edge of eagerness, as if they wished she would hurry up and somehow release them instead of just sitting there eating the sausage rolls. They talked as if there were nothing mysterious in Francine's enthusiasm about meeting the Paki from Dean's Road, and before she could tell them he was someone she would never forget, they seemed to have forgotten he had ever been mentioned.