This Side of Brightness (11 page)

The following day he and Eleanor are turned away from four restaurants and refused admittance to a cinema despite their clothes. On the streets people mutter about them. Cars slow down and taunts are hurled. At home, in the apartment on 131st Street, Walker must bend his body to duck under the doorframe. Eleanor puts her hand in his jacket pocket as he carries her over the threshold.

Her waist is wren-thin and adolescent, and he whispers that he could carry ten of her and she says, “Don't you even think about it, I'm the only one of me you're ever going to get.”

She takes the mothball from his pocket and shakes her head in amusement, thumping him playfully on the chest. The long white taffeta of her wedding dress swishes as she walks down the corridor to the common bathroom. She flushes the mothball down the toilet.

“Get ready for me,” she shouts along the corridor over the gurgle of water.

“I'm ready, hon.”

Back in the room, she latches the door. She has translated her face by removing her makeup. Just seventeen, she looks even younger. Walker is out of the jacket and standing by the piano, motioning for her to play. She shakes her head, no, and drags him away from it, onto the single bed, where they fall in a rehearsal of many nights of dreams.

“Ready my foot,” she says, and her hands disappear inside his shirt, around to his back, and she pulls him very close.

They move like two chiaroscurists above the covers, black and white, white and black, then sleep under foreheads wet with sweat. They lie on their sides, arms around each other, one hip a hill of bony pink, the other muscular brown. Eleanor wakes and kisses the scar above Nathan's eye. The clock on the wall cuckoos for eight o'clock in the evening. Desire lies on her tongue like morning breath, and she wakes him with a playful jab to the stomach.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” he grunts.

“Don't fall back asleep.”

He opens his eyes. “Did y'all ever see a crane dance?”

“No.”

“One foot first, then the other.”

“Show me.”

“Sandhill cranes,” he says. “Like this. I saw them all the time in Georgia.”

She laughs as he rises from the bed and dances on the mattress.

Later, there is a loud knock at the door. Walker, in his underpants, ritually bends his head at the doorframe. He scratches his belly as his eyes adjust.

Vannucci, Power, and the fortune-teller stand, grinning, with four bottles of champagne in their hands. The fortune-teller breezes in, clicking across the floor in gold lamé heels, her butterfly sleeves hanging down. Power limps after her, his teeth already pulling at the champagne cork.

Vannucci's balding head peeps around the open frame, then backs away, embarrassed.

But the fortune-teller sits on the bed beside Eleanor and pulls back the covers to reveal the girl's white toes. Eleanor flushes and draws her foot back. The fortune-teller chuckles and grabs again.

Walker, leaning against the piano, struggles his way into a pair of trousers, one foot in the air, while Power tries to push him over and spray champagne down his underwear.

Only Vannucci waits outside the door until the couple is fully dressed, and then the party begins, the handle on the Victrola wound up ferociously by the red-faced Italian. He stands above the machine as the needle travels over the grooves. It gives out solitary, beautiful notes. He smiles at the rhythm, clicks his fingers, drains a glass. Power puts an empty bottle to his lips and imitates a trumpet with it. The fortune-teller lifts her dress way up high to reveal two very red garters and seamed stockings. She scissor-kicks toward the ceiling, singing with the music, the songs slowly dropping down from her throat toward her hips, where they swivel.

“You're a classy dame,” says Power.

“Thank you, sugar. You been at the laudanum, then?”

“Why's that?”

“Either that or you're drunk.”

“No I ain't.”

“Then why ain't you dancin'?”

“You just said the word.”

“He's drunk as a stewbum!”

“No I ain't!”

A hush descends when Maura O'Leary appears at the door. Still in mourning black, hair in a bun, lace at her neck, she says she hasn't come to stay. She sighs and looks around the room, sees the piano in the corner topped with bottles and a lit cigar propped over the edge, smoke curling up from it.

“Well, well, well,” she says.

“Ma'am?”

“No more ma'am. No need to call me ma'am.”

“Yessum,” says Walker.

“Maura is easiest. Call me Maura.”

“Yessum. Yes.”

She sighs. “I never thought I'd see a day like this, never thought I'd see anything like it.”

“Me neither.”

“I'm not saying it's the best thing.”

From the far side of the room Sean Power belches and says, “Nothing wrong with it.”

“I didn't ask you,” says Maura.

“And ya didn't not ask me, neither.”

“I mean,” she says, “in some places it's not legal.”

“Not New York,” says Power.

Maura touches the lace at her neck, fingers it for a long time. “In some places you go to jail. In some places they'll kill you.”

“Illegal don't mean it's not right.”

“Well, that's true,” says Maura.

“So we agree?” says Power.

“Perhaps we'll agree to disagree.”

“I knew we'd agree on something,” mutters Power.

“Shut up, Sean!” says Walker. “Let the lady say what she has to say.”

A silence permeates the room. Power slugs at the bottle of champagne and passes it to Vannucci, who doesn't drink. The fortune-teller goes to the window, looks out.

“We love each other, Mom,” says Eleanor eventually.

“It's not always enough.”

“It's enough for us.”

“You're young.”

“Walker here ain't exactly sprung chicken!” says Power.

Looking around again, Maura says, “And I don't know how Con would feel about this either, but I guess I'll just have to wait for heaven and see then. I'm not so sure he'd be happy. I'm not so sure I'm happy. I'm not so sure anybody's happy.”

“I'm happy!” shouts Power.

Walker darts a look at his friend, then shifts his stance. “We ain't out to make you unhappy, ma'am.”

“You gotta remember,” she says, “it'll be hard times for you even when it's good times.”

“We know that. Thank you, ma'am. Maura.”

“Well. I said what I wanted.”

“Thank you.”

“Now I'd like a little drink, please.”

“Forgetting my manners,” says Walker.

Maura wets her lips at the edge of a glass of champagne. “Good luck to you both, I suppose.” Putting down the glass, she turns to leave, but at the door she hangs her head and says, “Maybe you'll be good together. Maybe you'll be okay.”

“You think she means it?” asks Walker, when the door is closed.

“Of course she does,” says Eleanor. “She gave us the piano, didn't she?”

“She's a fine woman. The finest of fine women.”

“All right, then,” says Power, swinging his cane. “Let's dance!”

“You the dancingest cripple I ever seen!” says the fortuneteller, moving away from the window, swirling her hips.

“You bet ya.”

And then Power roars, “Let the jelly hit the fan, boys!”

The group raises a toast to long life and happiness, and, to the beat of Sean Power's imaginary trumpet, the newly married couple flaps a crazy dance, all arms and legs, on top of the piano late into the night. Walker winks at Eleanor as he stands on one foot and stretches out his arms.

*   *   *

A series of bricks greet them through the bedroom window, leaving shards of glass on the floor and a hole in the frame until they simply just tape up a sheet of plastic to slap in the wind. One of the bricks is wrapped in a note that reads
NO PENGUINS ALLOWED
. Another says
SILKS OUT
. Another says, simply,
NO
.

Walker pays for the damage to the windows and rents an apartment higher up, unreachable from the street by stone or rock. He knows it would be much worse elsewhere; in other parts of the city they would end up dead. He feels as if he has exiled himself to the air, but he knows there is safety for Eleanor in the exile.

Marriage has brought to him the things that it marries: temperance and bitterness, love and disaffection, fecundity and bareness, longitude and its own startling finality. So he leaves the stone throwers alone and drags everything upstairs to the new apartment, even the piano.

It is a larger room, the sunlight exposing gaps in the wooden floorboards, yellow wallpaper peeling off the walls, iron-colored water stains around the kitchen sink. They still share a toilet with other tenants. The floorboards of the corridor creak when they walk toward it.

Eleanor throws her toothbrush out one morning when she leaves it at the sink by mistake. She has seen legions of cockroaches crawling around the bathroom.

Next door to them lives a cornet player, and his deep notes sound out at all hours of the night. He plays with a truncated rhythm, waking up at the weirdest times. And in the morning when they walk past his room he hisses at them through the gap under the door: Penguins, he says, fucking penguins. Eleanor has developed a special walk through the apartment—she calls it the Antarctic Shuffle—and she laughs when she does it: her feet flatfooted and her ass sticking out, her elbows tucked in by her waist, and her hands flapping out at her side. But late at night she curls up in bed and cries at the thought of slices of glass landing on their bed, ripping open their naked flesh. And so Walker tells her things that help her sleep, things he invents and remembers and, by remembering, invents.

*   *   *

“I weren't much more than a shirttail, see, and I wanted to make myself a gator-skin wallet. I'd seen lots of boys at school with wallets from gators. So I told my momma. She had herself a shotgun and I asked her for a loan of it. I said I was gonna shoot myself a gator so's I could make that wallet. And she said, Y'all can't shoot a gator, I done told you that before, Nathan; it ain't right to hurt nothing.

And I says, Momma, it's no different'n a cow. So she looks at me all Momma-like and smiles. No different'n a cow! she says.

Big ol' voice. She had a big ol' voice right up till she died.

Anyways. Next day she takes me out in the canoe, and I'm the one paddling. Right over near a place called Cow Island. We wait a long time by the swamp, her and me, and all I could see was gator eyes. And this one gator, he's lying in the mud, all quiet like. Then this heron flies low over the water and lands nearby. The gator just ups and swishes his tail and knocks the heron clean dead. Eats it up. And so Momma, she turns to me and says, Well then, son, y'all ever seen a cow do
that?
”

*   *   *

On Sunday mornings they walk together to a Southern Baptist service in a basement by Saint Nicholas Square. If the streets are quiet they walk hand in hand. But if they hear a car come behind them, or a window opening, or voices around a corner, they unclasp and part like two rivers. Eleanor likes to arrive at the service a little late so the great lift of gospel music greets her when she pushes open the door. She feels comfortable here. The preacher's voice goes up and down, a wild landscape of vowels and consonants. Sometimes he punches his hands toward the ceiling, and after services he kisses all the women on the cheek, even Eleanor.

On a late spring morning she is baptized in a tub of cold water near the basement stairs. The choir, in white tunics trimmed with gold, stands around and sings. The preacher rolls up his sleeves. A chorus of hallelujahs is raised when he dunks Eleanor in the bath. Embarrassed by the white dress against her skin—the wetness exposes her girdle—she folds her arms across her breasts, but the preacher whispers, “You look like an angel, pull back them wings.” She sits up in the tub and laughs. The choir rings out in song again, and afterward the congregation munches on potato salad and well-cut sandwiches.

She and Walker stroll home in the heat, and her dress is almost dry by the time she turns the key in the door.

In the Catholic church downtown where she used to go there were dark mutterings from the white people in the pews, even though Walker never went there with her. The priest grew red-faced and shook his finger at her, all resentment and narrow eyes and acrimony. He banned her from the services when Eleanor suggested to him that Jesus was, more likely than not, much darker than He was ever allowed to look on the cross.

*   *   *

She sits on the fire escape, hidden from view. She pulls down one shoulder strap of her summer dress and holds her face up to the sun in the vainest of hopes for something near equivalence with her husband. Earlier, at a shop on 125th Street, the owner wouldn't allow her to try on a hat. He curled up his lip in disgust. He said he'd heard about her, that anyone who lived with niggers became a nigger themselves. He said he didn't want any nigger hair in his hats. Bad for business. The words foamed at the edge of his mouth, and he tightened his eyes. “You can buy one,” he said, “but you can't try it on.”

Eleanor placed the hat on the counter silently and went home to sit on the fire escape.

Now, turning her face to the hot sun, she drops the second strap on her dress. Below the fire escape, rows of boys sit on crates and shine shoes as the summer sun hammers down.

Walker can only chuckle at the sight of her burnt skin. “It won't do no good for what's in your belly,” he tells her.

He rubs cream on her chafed back and across her neck.

“Bet it's a boy,” he says.

“What makes you think that, hon?”

“The fortune-teller told me.”