White People (35 page)

“Seem like it ought to be around here.” The widow moved from vase to firewood box to mantel. She shifted things. There sat an unopened jar of jam, a tartan bow topping it. A gift from Mrs. Battle? An inheritance?

“I busy checking,” the woman promised.

But I stood remembering Mrs. Battle’s honesty: “I ain’t got no money today.” “Pearl dead.” “Vesta Lotte Battle tries.” “I reckon you’ll do what you wants.” I felt I’d learned something from the old woman. I still couldn’t explain quite what.

“Maybe it been stole. Yeah, stole probably,” the obese woman patted around behind a sheeny Last Supper wall rug. Then she moved to a calendar that showed Christ holding out his own lit-up and dripping heart. His face looked sobered. You could see why.

“Assurance? These young boys now’ll steal you blind. Ain’t nobody safe. Too, I getting so I forgets. You sure it already a Saturday again? I done sunk mighty low but I still hunting. Don’t you fret your pretty head none, I gone find it yet. You so pretty. Look how ‘good’ and yellow his hair is. Golder’n that”—and she scanned the room for her favorite picture, then pointed to the rouged Jesus who posed nearby—heartless Himself because He kept
offering
it to everybody.

Such flattery always sickened me. I really couldn’t abide it. “Here,” I bent, kicking over one corner of her rag rug. Since the house was dark, since her notched swollen back was toward me, it was easy to unpocket the two quarters. I picked them up, held them out to her. “These?” I said.

She turned, she made a cry, “No!” She inched forward, blinking, her jaw slack. Each huge arm now lifted from the elbow—wobbling like udders as she neared me. The sad weight hanging off her sides and breasts suddenly seemed like a burden assigned, not chosen. In the face, surprise mixed with such fear. Fear that I might take these back, fear I meant to trick her. I couldn’t stand watching.
May this job end, and now, Amen. I am not fit to earn a living in this world
. “So let’s see here, that’s what?—fifty—five zero—cents, paid in full?” I fiddled with my black book. “Listen, there’ll be a new fellow next week. Just to make sure you get full credit, you’ll want to save these. Just give him these same two next week, okay? Okay.”

I passed her fifty cents. All the hut’s accidental sunlight, the shine from her red candle got snagged across two silver coins. Her callused hand itself, charcoal dark on its back, showed a pale pink copper color inside. It seemed that years of work for whites had rubbed the true black pigment off her palm.

Her face gleamed, the upper body rocking toward me. Moaning, she showed me my own coins—like these were two working eyes that some genius had awarded a blind woman, round things she could pop right into ruined sockets, and see again.

“I still on the assurance, Assurance?”

Beside her name, I read the tally, three policies complete: Two thousand three hundred five dollars and fifty cents. “Consider yourself
carried, please.” I backed into daylight, glad even for the posse of sunning mongrels. They rose, stretching, grumpy at their duty. We all have our jobs.

She hid both eyes behind the heavy crook of one great arm.

I heard her weeping, then explaining to the crowd of paper Jesuses, “Your Dorothy ain’t lost out after all, Savior. You done carried her over into the Promised Land of another week of Surrance and for free. I still under the coverage. Your old Dot here, she still covered, Lord.”

N
OW
I
’M
going on sixty. It seems impossible, but years are really the bottom line, aren’t they? Semi-retired, I’ve had the usual two heart attacks but, as with some of us who get the best cardiac specialists, I lived. Of course, as a young man, I went into business for myself. I actually did pretty well.

It came about in a strange enough way. I was working other odd jobs, saving up for law school. I’d got my BS through night courses. My parents lived to see me graduate. They were so happy about it. My father wore his reading glasses all through the ceremony. I wanted to tell my folks, “No, this is just the start … don’t be so thrilled so early.” But they were.

I sometimes wonder what they’d think if they could see where I live now. We just built a fancy guest wing onto our beach place. I designed it myself. It doubled the floor space of our original cottage. These days we don’t have too much company and the addition’s not that practical. I just wanted to add it on is all. The kids come down when they can get away from their jobs and such. My wife calls this wing—with its white spiral suitcase, all the glass, cathedral ceilings—Gerald’s Taj Mahal. My wife is from one of
the
old families around here. She stops short of calling my new annex that dreaded word of hers: “nouveau.” I can’t explain to her just why I had to get so flashy this time around.

Last August, she and I were on our new porch just sitting there, reading. It was late afernoon. A young white couple, strangers, wandered off the public beach. Holding hands, they crossed our property,
headed toward the road. They were country kids in bathing suits, very tall, they moved well, they were as good-looking as they’d ever be. They walked right by the entrance to our new guest wing. I jumped up. “What’s wrong?” Millie asked from behind me. I shook my head No. I couldn’t answer for a while. In the second I’d seen one pale man and woman come up from the ocean, slowed by sand and tramping toward our fine glass house, I understood I’d built it for them. For my parents, dead these thirty-odd years, people whose idea of an annual vacation was one spendthrift afternoon at the State Fair outside Raleigh. For a second, in the late light, I thought they’d finally come home to collect.

But my career so-called, I was telling you about that. I cleaned two laundromats for a rich ill-tempered bachelor. We hardly ever saw each other. He’d leave my pay envelopes in his rural mailbox. He must’ve liked my work. His will left me both laundromats. I was twenty-five by then. I’d been studying law on my own. This first equity helped get me a school loan. I made Law Review at Duke. I was thirty-one when I finished.

I moved back here to Falls and bought another laundry unit. I hung up my shingle and started managing the estates of the lawyers and dentists whose widows needed help, whose Princeton sons now practiced in flashier cities. The boys’d gone off to Atlanta and New York where real fortunes could be made. Me, I stuck it out locally. In the late Fifties, I put new laundromats into the shopping centers that’d started opening nearby and all up into Virginia. Then, with our kids off in good schools, with me now spending more time managing my own holdings than other people’s, I invented something.

I’d stayed polite and steady, of course—forever grateful to have a leg up in this town society-wise. To this day I follow my dead mother’s advice, I still say “Please” and “Thank you very much.” They still like that. And it’s only now, when I no longer
have
to be polite, it’s only now that people notice my manners and find them humble, touching. Odd. I got somewhat sly. I concocted (with a smart college boy’s summer help) and patented (on my own) an adjustable coin plunger for commercial washers and driers. It used
to be—when prices went up (as they will)—a laundromat owner had to rebuy the whole coin-activator component. With my device, the owner can just adjust his own machine’s templates. He can ask whatever seems fair—and without getting soaked by the manufacturer every time he ups the load cost by a dime or a quarter. It sounds simple. It is. “Strictly a nickel and dime operation,” my wife teases me. But I got there first and it has made our financial life a good bit easier.

I took over other laundry facilities. I worked all this out conscience-wise: Washing helps people, right? My forty-one Carolina/Virginia locations are open to all—all who have some pocket change and the will to stay tidy. Who can argue with the beauty and value of a clean 100% cotton business shirt, pressed, brand-new, and on its hanger, ready-to-wear? How could that cause anybody pain?

Over my years in business, I’ve been ethical usually, and (to be fair to myself) sometimes even when it hurt. One thing I admit I’m proud of: I volunteered as an unsalaried consultant in a local class-action against the cotton mill here. Nowadays, newspapers call my parents’ disease ‘brown lung.’ Then we just said, They’ve Got What You Get From Working Too Long In The Mill. The Wages of Wages.—Owners, clever, never let anybody
title
the sickness. That meant it wasn’t real, see?—Workers won this go-round. Japanese-made filters now purify the plant, replacing its entire air supply every twenty minutes. Some new insurance benefits are in place, there’s back-pay for those too broken-winded to work.

S
TRANGE
, though technically I’m pretty well set now, I’ve never really felt rich. If that’s any defense! Weird that my own kids have trust funds—it’s thrilling, really. Only two bothered finishing college, of course. One teaches the deaf in Savannah. Our middle daughter, Miranda, took Sarah Lawrence by storm and will enter Harvard Law this fall. Our baby girl lives in St. Louis with a black airlines mechanic who plays jazz on weekends. She says she’s happy. You have to believe them. I know that her living situation shouldn’t bother me. But, hey, it does bother me some, what can I say? Nobody’s perfect.

Oh, and I’m not insured. Drives my estate planner absolutely crazy but, after that first experience, forget it. Insurance based on getting sick, they call Health. The kind depending on everybody’s fear of death they call Life!

You can have it.

S
OME
S
ATURDAY MORNINGS
here lately I wake at our beach place and I’ll be half out of bed before understanding I don’t have to go to work. It’s almost disappointing. I’m free finally. No routes left. I still remember most every house along Sunflower Street and Atlantic Avenue, my Eventualities crew.

I
HAVE
a mind that holds onto such details: the one that told the same three easy riddles, the one in the metal wheelchair and wearing, for no good reason, a cowgirl hat.—A head for facts is good in a lawyer and a tinkerer like me. But you can overdo remembering. Recalling too much makes the person inefficient. As I age, early memories come clearer. I still picture many a door opening on those wizened faces. Many faces probably no older than mine now. I settle back in bed, I listen to the ocean working at reclaiming our oceanfront lot. It should soothe you, having a big white glassy house right on the beach. So I lie here looking at the patterns sunlight-on-water moves across our high white ceiling. Times, I say—low so as not to wake Millie—“That’s over and done.” Then I try and catch more sleep. But you know how it is, once your eyes are open, you can pretend for forty minutes but you’re awake for good.

Over thirty-odd years, I’ve told myself to forget the insurance route. And yet, lately for no good reason, it’s been coming back on me, like an over rich meal.

We all have our crimes. Right?

I
REMEMBER
, after Sam got hold of my list, before he rang up Cleveland with news of impounded funds, he promised me I’d done
the right thing. Sam said I’d fingered fewer Overdues than any collector he could remember, especially for a
young
collector. They were really ruthless about turning in certain oldsters, these darned eager-beaver kids. Sam claimed I must be good for my clients’ morale. “Thank you,” I said. “Tried,” I said. Since I’d personally floated many of my old folks’ funeral payments for weeks, months—I
was
their morale.

“You’re beginning to look better already, Jerry. Know your problem? See, you’re like Charlie Chaplin or this Paul Robeson or Mrs. Roosevelt maybe—you want to be all things to all people, but you can’t. Nobody can. Choose maybe four, six, tops. Think of these as job slots you’ve filled. You get to pick this one handful, then you really better stick your neck out—but just for them. The rest you let go. You’ve got to, Jerry. Of your six all-time keepers, I seriously doubt one’s on this list. Don’t say otherwise, Jer.—My job? I’m here to make you feel better. You haven’t got the organic chemistry figured out yet. You’re like me—just dripping virtue. There’s no percentage in taking it to heart, son. What we’re doing here is rigged, sure, but you know why, Jerry? Because it’s part of the world.”

Soon as he phoned in our nine worst credit risks to Cleveland—a town he called The Mistake by the Lake—Sam offered me a drink right from his bottle. This time I took it. My eyes watered. To me the stuff’d already started tasting like old couches, the smoky interiors of huts, my Baby Africa route and brown clientele distilled.—I drank and drank it so I’d sleep. My homely boss leaned back, he took his longest hardest bourbon-pull so far. Dazed, I sat in the office’s half-light, drunk. Sam gulped; I kept watching his notched Adam’s apple hopping and hopping like some small live thing you pity.

I quit Funerary Eventualities forty years ago. I still feel responsible for those nine who never got the warm reception they deserve. On the next plane, I mean. And, look, I don’t even
believe
in the next plane, you know? Still, I understand certain basics: Everybody expects a few sure things, a bit of blessed assurance. A person wants to feel covered.

Hey, and I appreciate your listening. Really. I don’t know—I’ve
kept fretting over this, feeling it for all these years. I mean, basically I’m not all that bad of a man, am I. Am I?

I’ve never once credited any type of heaven. No way. But I still worry for the souls I kept from theirs.—Even now I know the names of my nine clients I squealed on. They are:

I still try and imagine her—on hold, rocking between this world and the next. I want to either bring her back or send her on toward her proper reward. I can’t.

Vesta Lotte Battle owed me $12.50.

T
HERE
, I’ve told you. I’ll feel better. Thank you very much.

1987-1989

Thanking people is my favorite vice. The following friends have been especially kind in reading my work fast, always with honesty and empathy. I owe much to Jane Holding, Mitchell Eil, Danny Kaiser, Amanda Urban, Elisabeth Sifton, Peter Andersen, Steven Burke, Thomas Emerson Link, George Andreou, Marie Behan, Connie Brothers, Doris Grumbach, Andrea Simon, Claire Whittaker, Jane Cooper, my former students, and so many other fellow believers. Thanks, friends.