Читать книгу Union Square - Adrian Koesters - Страница 10

Part One: Carmen.

Thursday Morning: Good-bye, House of Good Shepherd

Carmen Stunchen was not in bed. As she leaned into the glass of the front window, peering out from the third floor over to Union Square, she was thinking of Mr. H. L. Mencken, on his Hollins side of the park, who had sometime opined that, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking,” and she was trying to see over to his house. It pleased her that he lived there. All she knew about him was that he was famous, she didn’t know why or what for. Really, she thought that it was a shame he was so old and, what they said, so ill. She wanted to believe he looked down into the square at night, and she wanted to know that when she was there, he was looking at her when she strolled, or sat, or much later at night when no lights were on and no police patrolled. She would agree with this observation Mencken made, misunderstanding him or perhaps not altogether.

Otherwise she wasn’t noting much else in particular. She was beat. She could hear her seven-year-old daughter, Lucille, crying in the next room. She supposed Mr. Morris had hit her or something. He had slept, but he woke, and when he woke after staying the night always wanted to get down to things, but Carmen was not interested in his foolishness first thing in the morning, definitely not on her living room couch. She had sent him off to the bathroom to make himself a little more respectable, if possible.

The sun peels over the row houses on the right-hand side of the park, she thinks, and watches the slowness of its light begin to fill up Union Square. Through the day, the clean, weak sunlight will pass over the tarred lengths of the roofs, slide over the straight moldings, and a block away stagger downhill. The sun will light up the House of Good Shepherd on the west and the brick fronts of Hollins and Lombard Streets on the north and south. Over the day it will heat up the square, seduce flower bulbs, slide down the buildings, cross the street, and by evening once more make what length it can up the fronts of the eastern houses before releasing doorways and steps and sidewalks to darkness, disappearing for good finally into the west.

A cupola shades the drinking fountain. She can’t see the flowers that emerged yesterday afternoon, but they have already had it. She can’t see the few dozen cigarette butts and the square bottle thrown into one of the hedges, but she sees them in her mind. A gentleman composed mostly of grey shoves his way in the semi-dark across the diagonal of the square block of park, and Carmen thinks from the shape of him that she knows him, or that she’d like to know him.

H. L. Mencken is in fact in his house, ending his life on one side of the park, but he doesn’t come into this story. Here afternoons littered with white children running to and from schools, here alleys and back streets with Negroes invisible to the whites, but not to her. She doesn’t care about any of that, though—she wouldn’t use the word shit, but it was just that to her, boring, stupid, she wouldn’t pay it any mind. She had given herself that luxury a long time ago.

This light that travels the row houses from east to west on Union Square, even into the small windows of its basements, This, she thinks, this is perfect.

She’s hungry. She tries to peer again through the trees in Union Square over to Hollins where Menkle or whatever his name was, but it’s too far to get a good look. Aside from being old and sick, he was rich, that she knew. He’d lived there forever. She needed some money, and she wished she could go over and ask him for some, but she was going to have to go to her mother’s for it instead, and who knew if she’d even give it to her. Well, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

She lifted her shoulders in a luxurious gesture. Her house had been broken up into apartments and the streets around the square were starting to show signs of age, but for her they could never be less than distinguished, these brick fronts and marble steps that had all been rich at one time, better than anything you could find anywhere, she bet.

She had been frightened of the place when she was younger, frightened of the sisters who went in and out of the House of Good Shepherd, the home for wayward girls, a place her mother threatened her with but where she had never had to go because she had married Mr. Morris, Donna and Lucille’s father. He lied and said she was sixteen instead of fifteen, and this Menkle, he had lived on the opposite corner to the Sisters the whole time, his whole life just about, and now she lived here, too, and the Sisters couldn’t get her now no matter what she did. The year it was, even, had a lovely ring to it. Nineteen-fifty-two. The war and all, it was over. Things were going to get better and better.

But she was broke.

She heard Lucille crying again and called out, “Be quiet in there!” Mr. Morris laughed through the wall and said something, but she couldn’t make it out. She heard Mr. Morris in the bathroom after that, moving around. She walked through, saw Lucille in bed with her face turned to the wall. “Oh, good,” she thought, “she’ll get some sleep.” Donna, the elder girl, was on the trundle next to Lucille’s bed, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.

“Good morning, Glory,” Carmen said with a little laugh, “you’re sure up early.”

She reached for the pack of cigarettes that was on the top of the dresser. Donna transferred her gaze from the ceiling to her mother but didn’t speak.

Mr. Morris came out of the bathroom at a trot, stopped when he saw Carmen, smiled broadly and swatted her on the fanny, said, “I’m starving—let’s go out and get something.”

“Sure, handsome,” Carmen said, “but let me get myself put together once, would you, for a change?” She said this with a laugh, and then, as though there were only the two of them in the room, began a slow strip-tease of the already brief garments she had on. Donna closed her eyes but didn’t move. Mr. Morris howled and clapped and slapped his knees as if Carmen had been up on stage down on the Block. Someone from the house next door banged on the wall.

Thursday Noon: You Wouldn’t Give Your Two Cents Worth

Carmen twisted the gold-plated rhinestone ring on her engagement ring finger, waiting for Miss Maurice to come back into the kitchen. There was a pitcher of home-made wine on the table. Miss Maurice made the wine up in the bathtub and put it into glass bottles and stored them down in the cellar, but she always had a pitcher of it sitting on the kitchen table, and when Carmen had been a little girl and had stayed there very often, she’d run by, take a dipper of wine and drink it, and then run out again to play. Later she would say that she didn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been at least slightly tipsy, but at the moment she was not in the mood to drink anybody’s homemade wine. She wanted a stiff shot, but she wouldn’t find that here. She twisted at the ring again and then knew it might come down to the wine in a minute after all.

She was in one of the most broke periods she could remember for a good while. She easily found jobs and as easily lost them: she’d work for six weeks or three months, and then she’d get caught with someone’s hand up her skirt, or hers in the cash box, and that would be that. She’d moved the girls umpteen times since they were babies and after Mr. Morris had left them mostly permanently, until her mother had had enough of it, the moving in and out and the squabbling and the babies crying, and told her that she’d pay the rent on an apartment, and by luck she’d found the one on Union Square, where she was, damn it all to hell, going to stay until they put her in the cold ground. The landlady and the neighbors didn’t know she was part this and part that, and she wasn’t going to tell them. But those girls were driving her crazy, she was out of work again, and she needed something besides homemade wine and polite white boys.

Miss Maurice wasn’t Carmen’s relative, though her nephews, nieces, and godchildren littered the length of Lemmon Street. Miss Maurice’s parents had named her what they had thought was one of the prettiest names they had ever heard, and it wasn’t until she was well into her teens that someone mentioned they thought it might be a man’s name. She’d had trouble collecting insurance benefits from her husband, a Mr. Buddy Jackson, whom no one, including Carmen’s grandmother whose best friend she was, had ever met, and who had been almost all white and had worked as a porter on the B & O his entire life. After he died, the company was shocked to meet this nearly coal-black woman claiming to be his wife, and wouldn’t give out benefits without proof that her name was indeed Maurice. But she had a birth certificate and a baptismal certificate, and she took the monsignor from St. Peter Claver with her to halt any other funny business they might think up. He witnessed her signature, and she and Carmen’s grandmother lived on the money in high style. Carmen was glad to get back to her house on Lemmon Street, plain but lavish in feeling, quiet and dark, small and real, the house where she had stayed off and on all through her childhood and into her teen years.

When Carmen was a little girl her mother would drop her off for the day and Miss Maurice came to the door without anybody having to knock on it. From her face anybody could have told you she had spent her life not giving a damn what anybody thought about anything, what Carmen loved about her. Skinny, her sparse hair oiled back and pinned in a tiny bun at the back of her head, she wore out-sized costume earrings of rhinestones set in a gaudy circular pattern, and there was always a pair of reading glasses hanging from a chain on her large chest. Her nose was small, as if someone had smashed it into her face above lips that when she was thinking pursed into a duckbill shape Carmen walked around imitating. Miss Maurice continually worked her tongue over her large, bow-shaped mouth, and it was this perfect mouth that made you wonder just how old she really was. Carmen knew she was well into her seventies, maybe older.

Carmen’s grandmother, Carmella Stuncheon, who had been as black as Miss Maurice was herself, had lived with Miss Maurice after Mr. Jackson died, and had died herself some years previously. Carmen’s mother had been the one to hold the threat of incarceration at the House of Good Shepherd for what had seemed like an infinity of years, and it would be her mother, white as a sheet, who was now in the living room playing cards with Miss Maurice and the other ladies at the canasta game. But it would be Miss Maurice who would come back out to the kitchen and give Carmen a little something to tide her over.

“Why, hello, child!” she’d cried down to her from the front door as she had done since Carmen was little. Carmen had to step down a stair when she opened the door. “Oh, my goodness, look at you, you’re froze to death. Get on in here and get yourself warmed up in the kitchen. We’re playing cards.”

Preamble was unknown to Miss Maurice, as was conjecture about past and future. In this, she and Carmen were strangers to the other.

Miss Maurice and Carmella, for whom Carmen had been named, had had in their years together a peculiar way of keeping the Sabbath holy, and that was to go to the earliest Mass at St. Peter Claver and then to spend the rest of the day cooking, eating, playing cards, and drinking fruit wine and beer. They kept a poker game going from about noon until everyone left sometime between eight and ten at night, and then played canasta together with a dummy hand until midnight promptly. They shut the cards down, checked all the stoves in the kitchen and the locks on the front and back doors, and went to bed, most often separately but sometimes together, “Just for a little cuddle,” Miss Maurice would put it, raising her eyebrows at Carmella.

“Just a little one,” she’d say back and wink, “right after I soak my dentures.”

Since Carmella’s death, Sundays had remained poker day, but a canasta game now seemed to go on perpetually every other day of the week. “Hey, Olivia, look what I got,” Miss Maurice had said to Carmen’s mother, shoving Carmen like a little girl into the door of the parlor where six ladies were hunched over the card table or leaning back in their chairs. “She looks like she’s about to expire from chill. I’m going to set her in the kitchen and get her some tea and something to eat.”

“Don’t give her no money,” Olivia said, not looking up from her hand.

“Lord, that woman is hard,” Miss Maurice muttered, pulling Carmen by the elbow. “There’s days I miss your grandmother so much I could spit.”

Carmen didn’t touch the plate of cookies Miss Maurice set down in front of her. She looked around the kitchen, scratching one arm. The fixtures and paint and molding were more dated than most. There was a small open fireplace along one wall that had been adjusted for a gas appliance (the whole house was kept hot, but the kitchen especially hotter than Carmen could usually stand for very long), and the stove an old iron one converted from wood to coal, but wood could still be burned in it if wood was all you had. The ladies kept this stove going from first thing in the morning until they were ready to head to bed at night, and next to it was an oil-fueled range they used to boil water for tea and so on with a kettle that was boiling on it now.

Miss Maurice came in then. “Near forgot,” she said, and went, turned the oil stove off, which went out with a whoosh of flame, and took the kettle and filled a large brown clay water bottle with it. She wrapped it in a thick piece of old blanket, and handed it to Carmen. It was the exact degree of heat she had been needing all day and hadn’t known it. She leaned her abdomen into it.

“Stay put for one more hand, maybe two,” Miss Maurice said to her. “I’m on a winning streak.”

Thursday Evening: Bump Miss Susie

The three two-bit pieces Miss Maurice had finally won and handed over to Carmen lay heavy in the pocket of her skirt. They would come in handy in a little while, but right now she was standing by the drinking fountain in Union Square, looking up at her front windows, wondering. Mr. Morris must have already gone, and Donna and Lucille might be getting into trouble. Two days ago Donna had covered Lucille’s face in lipstick and yesterday it still hadn’t come off, but Carmen didn’t have money for cold cream. Mr. Morris had gotten some lunch things from Hollins Market, but he hadn’t eaten all of it when she’d left. What she was wondering was whether she ought to go in first and make sure the girls still had something to eat. They could put themselves to bed.

She had put herself to bed often enough, sometimes too early, sometimes before the sun went down, and she’d lie awake for hours, wearing her little bloomers and the under-blouse that tied with a faded ribbon she’d twirl between the fingers of one hand, over and over, while she told herself stories, mostly about living where girls flocked over the streets in their boots and short dresses and the enormous bows in their bobbed hair. Or she would listen to adult noises coming from downstairs, or the back yard, or the next room. When she was ten, she had to go with her grandmother to the clothing factory where Carmella swept buttons and thread off the floor, and it was Carmen’s job to pick out the threads and sort through the buttons by color. That was fun for an hour, tolerable for about another hour after that, and then it had crushed her, sitting alone on a stool with a big wooden box cutting into her knees, pushing the buttons into piles around the bottom of that box. Nowhere in her imagination had anybody ever had to do anything as crushing as that. The morning after the first day, she cried she didn’t want to go, but her mother, who was lying in bed, looking for the umpteenth time at an old magazine full of illustrated white people that she kept next to her, had gotten up and given Carmen a shake and a good slap. “Don’t you tell me what you don’t want to do, girl,” she said.

So after a while, she had gotten used to it, and often ended the long days amusing and comforting herself by climbing into the lap of whatever man had been at home when she got there, often too tired to eat anything, and putting her arms up around the man’s neck. She’d say, “Hello, Daddy,” to him just before falling asleep into his shirt. The middle of one night she had wakened to find the man on top of her, not penetrating but rubbing himself into her legs, she had opened her eyes wide and gasped, and he had laughed and said, “Why, hello, Baby!” She was frightened but she laughed right back up at him. What he was doing didn’t hurt, in fact it didn’t feel too bad, and when he was done he had wiped her off very gently and spent the rest of the night until she fell back to sleep again telling her stories of working on one of the big ships during the war, down in the hole, singing to her the song that he had sung to himself at sea, and she fell asleep humming it into his warm, sweet-smelling chest. Later there were others, and all of them hurt her but who her mother said she must let them be, but when she did, she would think of that man, and look up into the face of the rough one, wink, and chuckle, “Why, hello, Baby!” and then thought would disappear back into night, and often she wouldn’t remember another thing.

Oh! That’s right, she thought now, there were crackers and butter in the icebox, too. So that was all right, then. The girls had plenty. She turned and walked in the other direction, to a tavern she knew where the men were also plenty and the cigarettes went around well, and there might even be a shot or two of something that wasn’t to drink. She clicked her heels, humming “Bump Miss Susie” as she walked.

Friday Night: You Get What You Get

Carmen opened the door and found Paddy Dolan there. He was filthy, and he smelled like the last day of the dead. She pinched her nose.

“Where in hell you been? What you want?” she asked him.

“Just shut up and let me in,” he said. “I know your boyfriend ain’t in there, I seen him leave.”

“Well, he’s coming back.”

“Sure he is.”

She spit in his face, and watched as he wiped the spit off with his broken hand, looking her straight in the eyes all the while. She opened the door wider, and stepped back, and he went in. The landing was dark, and smelled sour and brown, like a nursing home, and all the doors were shut.

“Up here,” Carmen said, and he followed her swaying backside up the stairs.

She woke up a few hours later to the sound of a record player needle being scratched over a record. Lucille was standing next to the long wooden console with her hand in the interior, apparently simply sliding the record player arm back and forth over the surface of a record, and she was staring at Carmen without blinking. There was a jelly stain on her undershirt and she was wearing some old pair of summer pajama bottoms that barely fit over her bottom and legs. Her hair was a mess of rats’ nests, and her eyeglasses down low over her nose. Carmen was enraged at the sight of her.

“Goddamn you, you stupid little thing,” she said, as she thought, under her breath, and tried to leap up from the sofa to smack her out of the room, but the sex and needle hangover she didn’t know she had slammed her down again. She draped the back of one arm over her eyes.

The screeching kept on. “Goddamn it, Donna, Carmen, Lucille, whatever your name is, stop that goddamned racket before I go crazy.” But this was said almost under her breath. And then the sound stopped, and then there was not another sound except for the toilet flushing and someone whistling. Carmen opened her eyes and Lucille was still standing there, looking at her, unblinking, her arm extended inside the console.

Four: Saturday Morning: Every Once in a While

Carmen stared at the empty, rusting can of spaghetti she had opened for the girls at dinner last night. They were still asleep and she had sat here at the table all night, the radio playing softly until it went off the air. She had listened to the buzzing for a while and then finally snapped it off altogether.

She had felt, after Paddy coming over, that she wanted to be just with her girls after all. When she was able to get up, she found him in the living room with them, and shooed him out. They sat on the couch, backs to the room, coloring up some newspaper. She’d felt a deep anger cut into her from somewhere. She didn’t know what it was, she wanted to ignore it so it wouldn’t spoil everything.

“Why, hello, Baby!” she cried out to them, a wide smile on her still deep red-lipsticked mouth. But they did not look up and smile and answer, “Hi, Mommy!” as they ought. They flinched, but they didn’t turn or speak or look up from what they were doing. She wanted to beat them then, but in fact she didn’t often have it in her to hit the girls when she wasn’t loaded or hung over. She stood in the middle of the room, felt foolish, felt the rage begin to rise over that. She saw somebody’s slipper laying on the floor, gave it a good kick, and it swirled across the floor and under the sofa.

“What do you want, spaghetti for dinner?” she asked them, and they said “Uh-huh” nearly in unison, but she was even too tired to smack them for their manners, even though that wasn’t beating, that was being a mother.

As she pivoted toward the kitchen, the room seemed to move up and down in a wave. “Oh. No. Not again,” she thought. She let out a kind of cry and put one hand on her abdomen, and at that the girls turned to see what the matter was, and then they did come running to her. They placed their small hands on her body, patting her back and her stomach, the top of Donna’s head coming up to about her shoulder and Lucille’s resting into her breast. She reached her own arms out and around them, and held them to her, and felt good again. She threw her head back and laughed.

“Well, girls,” she’d said down into their heads in the soft and funny voice that they loved but hardly ever heard, “guess what? Mr. Morris slept here.”

“Mr. Morris slept here,” she said to herself now at the table, out loud. She picked up the spaghetti can and threw it into the sink. One of the girls rustled and turned over, and began to snore lightly the way children do.

“Every goddamned body slept here,” she said. “Everybody sleeps here.”