Lazaretto (8 page)

“Well, hain't never seen nothin' of beauty in another man, truth be spoke, and y'all must forgive me about Sister's diction, but she been taught by the Quakers, and they say strange things like is a boy's hands beautiful. But I must say”—he turned Linc's hands over and looked at his palms, and then closed his oversized hands over both of Linc's and gently squeezed—“you got 'bout the finest hands I ever seen on a liddle white boy. Colored, too, for that matter.” He winked at Linc with his good eye and the harmonica did a double note as if to punctuate Buddy's pronouncement, and Linc felt the sound resonate deep in his chest
as if something essential had been moved around to accommodate the sound, to lock it in place.

“You always hold on to this, you hear me?” Meda said, as she thumped Linc's forearm. “The ugly is in her, not you. Never let another make you feel shame when the shame is their own for judging you with no eye trained on justice.”

THE TRIPS TO
Buddy's house became a Saturday-afternoon ritual for Meda and Linc after that. Bram would remain at the Germantown mansion and take piano instruction from Tom Benin's wife, and Meda and Linc would ride the trolley into town and eat hot roasted peanuts as they walked to Fitzwater Street, to her brother's house.

Linc imbibed the atmosphere at Buddy's house. He couldn't decide which he favored more, the tempo of their talk, which was like a creek rushing in a storm, or the way the blend of the banjo and mouth harp would sift inside of him and nestle, or the richness of their skin colorings, the varieties; he would study his own skin after he left there, hoping that if he looked at the inside of his arm long enough, a brown-tint would show through. Everything about being at Buddy's was a thrill to him, even when the air rippled with danger.

And it was dangerous. Men filled with rye swore that they'd been dealt marked cards. The youngest of the regulars, called Splotch owing to a birthmark across one entire side of his face that looked like a massive ink spill, would glare at Linc whenever he was in the room. Meda was watchful over Linc when Splotch was around. And this day she pulled Linc into the dining room and positioned his chair under one of the sketches she'd traced of Abraham Lincoln that Buddy had affixed to his wall. “You would think old Abe Lincoln was Jesus,” Buddy's wife, Nola, teased Meda. “His likeness hanging there 'sposed to protect the boy?”

“The boy already white, how much protection he need?” said Miss Ma. “Furthermore, you got ole Abe looking like a colored man on that picture of him you drew. You saying Jesus was a colored man, too, Sister?”

“I say Jesus is the color of everyman and no man,” Meda said, as she grabbed her hooded shawl from the hook. “And Jesus just reminded me I failed to order my biscuits from Lorraine for that Benin woman to have with her fried apples tonight. And even Jesus wants no part of her wretchedness when she is denied her requests.”

“You still got that Benin woman thinking you bake her bread by your own hands!” Nola laughed.

“Well, my hands arrange it on the plate, so I aver that I am responsible for her enjoying them,” Meda said, as she tied her hood under her neck and then told Linc that she was going around the corner to pick up biscuits, and to sit there with Mr. Lincoln and the fine ladies until she returned.

She hurried out the door. The February air had teeth and her hood was pulled low on her face and tied so tightly under her chin that she could barely move her head. She thought that she had the appearance of the grim reaper as she tried to look up and say how-do to the woman hurrying past her, but a blast of cold air made her lower her head, though she did stop and turn around after the woman returned her greeting with a quick
good afternoon
. The sound of the woman's voice went right to Meda's core and shook her, momentarily rearranging her so that she was no longer standing on her brother's block as the cold gnawed through her winter garb but instead was back in that room where everything had been painted white and Abraham Lincoln spoke to her from his picture on the wall. She turned now and called out to the woman who had hurried past her. “Sylvia? Is that you, Sylvia?” But the wind swallowed up her voice as she watched the woman's back float farther and farther away, and she started to chase after
her, but then she did not. What purpose would it serve, she asked herself, to barrage Sylvia with questions that she could not answer back then and surely could not answer now? Questions such as what had caused her baby to succumb? Did she suffer at all? She stopped herself. Sylvia's responses—or lack thereof—about her baby could not bring her child back to life. She started walking again. She wrestled with the terrible sadness that the sound of Sylvia's voice had unleashed in her, the twin tragedies of losing her baby and the president on the same night. She consoled herself that she now had Linc and Bram in her life. She had Ann; she cherished her time with Ann, limited though it was, and soon likely to be curtailed altogether because Ann had received an unpromising report about her mother's health: she had developed palsy, and, depending on how it progressed, Ann might need to return to Connecticut. But she had Ann at least for now, and although Linc and Bram and Ann could never completely repair the jagged rip in her heart from the death of her baby girl, their presence did soothe and soften the edges of it and allowed a seam to grow so that it was no longer a gaping hole.

She turned the corner, focused again on getting to Lorraine's house and procuring the biscuits. Told herself that likely it had not been Sylvia anyhow, as she couldn't imagine the situation that would have the likes of a refined one such as Sylvia down here unescorted in this neighborhood so close to sunset.

IT WAS SYLVIA.
And she couldn't believe herself that she was down here so close to nightfall. Her mother would be livid if she knew—her mother, her entire family still reeling from the brutal assassination of Negroes in the fall elections, Octavius Catto among them, whom her father knew well. But it was Nevada's birthday, and Sylvia's mother had made a multilayered coconut cake for Nevada, and Sylvia had left the house intending to deliver
the cake hours ago because she knew that Nevada was expecting a gentleman to call late afternoon to favor her with an evening recital at First African, and a dinner down in their fellowship hall. Sylvia planned to surprise Nevada with the cake, along with the hand-drawn card Vergie had made, which amounted to an arrangement of ink spills because Vergie had not yet mastered letters. The streetcar, though, had been late owing to the extreme cold temperatures, and then she'd stopped in Strawbridge and Clothier to warm up and had noticed a silk scarf swirling with color and she imagined the scarf draped around Nevada's shoulders, so she decided to purchase it. But it had taken her the better part of an hour to pay for the scarf because once the clerk learned that Sylvia was not buying the scarf at the behest of some lady-of-the-house for whom she worked, he claimed to be holding it for another customer, which provoked Sylvia's defiant nature, and she insisted she would wait and see if the customer returned and if not, then he would have no option but to sell it to her. He looked at the space she occupied as if she had become invisible. A rage brewed in her chest, and she walked away in a huff. She planted herself at the Market Street door. She placed the handled bag that contained the getting-heavier-by-the-moment cake on the floor next to where she stood. She called on her innate sense about people as she watched the mostly white people coming and going. They glanced at her as if they were glancing at a barrel, a cart, a post, some inanimate thing that did not breathe or think or feel. She waited; she would not be thwarted; the situation had expanded beyond the scarf as she felt bits and pieces of her rebuked self coalesce and strengthen. The times she'd been mistaken for the maid when she'd accompanied her parents on catering jobs; the job she'd quit at Pennsylvania Hospital after she'd been relegated to cleaning spittoons, though she'd been more than qualified to assist the nurses when they dressed wounds, or prepared soaks, or
even coaxed the indolent to swallow; the being made to wait while a white person was serviced first at the vegetable stall, or the fabric shop, or the cobbler to have her shoes resoled. She waited, trying not to allow their sudden blindness to her presence join forces with the rioting bits of her past kicking up dust in her chest. She waited a full half an hour before she saw him, or, more importantly, before he saw her, saw her for what she was—just a person, just a normal living human being. He was, paradoxically, half-blind. He was tall and walked with the slightest limp and had one glass eye that stared straight ahead, while the corners of the other crinkled as she nodded, and he nodded in return and touched the tip of his hat.

“Sir,” she said, as she grabbed up the bag containing the cake and moved in closer to him as they walked side by side, farther into the store.

“Ma'am?” he replied, stopping and turning so that he could focus on her completely with his working eye.

“I have a situation,” she said. “And I beg your indulgence as I explain it and ask for your assistance in a way that I hope you think not inappropriate.”

“Go ahead, please,” he encouraged.

She told him then of her attempts to purchase the scarf for her dear friend, told him how the clerk withheld the scarf. She focused on his working eye; it was a river shade of gray and flinched a few times during her recitation; otherwise his reaction was muted. “I do not profess to have vision into another man's heart,” she said. “I can only assess his actions, and, sir, forgive me for saying, but his actions reveal his belief that a Negro miss is not worthy of a beautiful scarf, and so he chose to use his considerable power to deny me, when really the only thing that should matter is my ability or not to pay the price that the scarf commands.” She reached into her cape pocket and pulled out her silk purse. “I am fully capable of paying the price of that scarf.” She took a deep
breath. “So my request of you, if you be so inclined, is to please purchase the scarf on my behalf.” She pulled a neat fold of dollars from her purse, but before she could count them out he raised his finger to stop her. He asked her to point out the clerk, and the scarf, which she did.

She hung back as she watched him walk in the direction of the counter. His limp was more pronounced, but still he managed to wave at the several people he passed who seemed to know him. She'd chosen well. The clerk held this gentleman in high regard, Sylvia noticed by the mammoth smile that tried to soften the harsh angles in the clerk's face. He leaned in and spoke to the clerk, and Sylvia attempted to read the clerk's face, but he turned too quickly and busied himself behind the counter. She shifted the bag containing the cake from one side to the other. She measured the time of day by the slant of sun pushing through the window. She would barely catch Nevada before Nevada left for her birthday night out on the town, if she caught her at all. She'd wanted to see Nevada's expression when she opened Vergie's card, and when she saw the detail on the cake Maze had crafted. Nevada worried that Maze thought her without the proper pedigree to be such a close friend to Sylvia, but Sylvia was eager to point to the cake as evidence that her mother did have sufficient affection for her. She stopped her thinking as she watched her well-chosen stranger walk toward her. He extended an expertly wrapped package, and Sylvia tried to exchange it for her neat fold of dollar bills.

He waved the money away. “The lad insists that you accept the scarf as his gift as evidence of his sorrow for his ill-chosen behavior.”

Sylvia gasped, but she didn't protest. Her mother always told her to accept a kindness with a simple thank-you. To do otherwise would rob not only her of the benefit of the gesture, but would steal also the joy of the one trying to do a good deed. So she said thank you, and curtsied slightly, and he bowed and said good day,
and just like that he limped away and Sylvia stood there for a moment and caught her breath. She placed the package in the bag on top of Nevada's birthday cake and proceeded into the dwindling afternoon sun.

Her legs felt like blocks of ice by the time she reached Fitzwater Street. She was certain Nevada was long gone by now, but at least she could warm herself at Miss Ma's fire before she started her journey back home. She walked up the few steps and was about to knock on the door, but there was a note on the door that directed any callers further down the street to Buddy's house. She said “Drats” into the wind and checked herself from saying more. She hated to go down there. Her mother would be mortified if she knew that Sylvia dignified a gambling house with her presence. Even Nevada did not go there, though Nevada's avoiding the place had nothing to do with the card games. “Too many women spruce around the dining room and kitchen for my liking,” Nevada had once told Sylvia. “And I do not know why my presence brings out the ugly in a bunch of women congregating and cackling. They sneer at me and shoot daggers at me with their eyes as if I am there to invite their husbands to knock skin with me.”

“Well, are you?” Sylvia had asked her, half-joking, which meant that she was half-serious, too.

She reluctantly started in the direction of Buddy's house, since she couldn't leave the cake out here on Miss Ma's steps; nor was she was about to lug it all the way back home.

She held the cake close to her as she walked, cursing the clerk in her head for causing a simple purchase to take the better part of an hour, even as the thought of the glass-eyed man softened her. She concentrated on the house numbers so that she would not bypass Buddy's. She'd been looking for the numbers when Meda passed her and she'd returned her greeting with a distracted “Good afternoon.” She'd had a delayed reaction, though.
Something about the woman—her greeting, her demeanor—had made Sylvia turn back around, but when she did, Meda had already rounded the corner and was out of view. And, anyhow, Sylvia had finally located the house.