A Star for Mrs. Blake (13 page)

The wind was fierce and it was twenty degrees colder than down on the street. The curved iron railings did not look high enough. Cora hung back near the wall. Cinders flew into her eyes. She wanted to flee, but where do you go when you are standing on top of the world? What had she done to so offend Mrs. Russell? Why had she made a point of saying that they weren’t friends and never could be? Why be so hurtful, when all that Cora meant was—

Katie was clutching her arm.

“Come! Minnie put a nickel in!”

She pushed Cora toward a telescope. Minnie’s coin had activated the machine, causing it to start ticking like a clock. They made Cora step up on a metal box and look through two eyepieces. She saw bridges and wide-open bays with all sorts of boats and hundreds and hundreds of brown- and red-brick buildings, all in shocking detail. She saw window shades and water towers and seagulls. Then the ticking stopped and the view went black.

Cora stepped back while the other two raced like schoolgirls around the deck to look at the Hudson River on the other side. You can only see something for the first time once. Cora’s world had expanded rapidly, but not from the vista. She remembered what Selma told her in the women’s waiting room in Boston.
“You got a lot to learn.”

Cora stepped up to the edge and put her fingers on the rail and let her hands absorb the coldness of the rusted iron. The city writhed and blew out smoke. It didn’t compromise. It didn’t promise fields of honor and forgetting. It separated black from white. Selma’s parting words were sounding different now.
“We ain’t friends,”
she had said, but she’d meant it as a friend would say it—to instruct you in your own illusions—intended in the kindest way.

The taxi climbed steadily uptown, outpacing the trolley cars and scattering slum children playing chalk games in the gutter, past shoppers jammed under the umbrellas of peddlers selling everything from shoes to frankfurters and lemonade—an uncountable number of Negro people from all over the country crammed into the northern grid of Manhattan. Blocks of row houses served double duty, as tenement apartments upstairs and storefronts down on the street, where you could buy auto parts, snuff, cheese and bread, get your gun repaired or your hair cut. Awnings reflected the scalding light of noon into banks of tenement windows, where residents had no qualms about stringing the family laundry. Airspace was living space in the crowded city.

Farther up they passed empty lots with nothing but rubble and the unemployed sitting around on wooden boxes, telling lies and killing time. Mrs. Russell stared intently out the window and commented only once, when they passed two wagons piled with cooking equipment and hitched to a horse; a traveling tin shop slowly working its way up Lenox Avenue.

“Will you look at that?” she said. “More pots and pans than the state of Georgia.”

Lily asked when was the last time she was home.

“Nineteen oh-one, the year my daddy died. I went down for the funeral.”

“You were living up North?”

Mrs. Selma Russell nodded and told the story of how her grandmama, who was known to have visions, looked at her palm and saw “needle and thread.”

She laughed hoarsely and coughed. “I says, Sure, I sees them every day!”

Elmore was two years old and Selma was working on her daddy’s farm in Sumter County, Georgia. The
very next day
after Grandmama saw the sign, a letter arrived from a girl Selma knew who had gone up North and found needlework, sewing at a manufacturer of men’s and ladies’ furnishings in downtown Boston. She wrote to say that the company was relocating to a brand-new building on Essex Street and they were hiring.

“So I left Elmore with my mama and came up,” Selma said. “I didn’t see my baby for seven years because I was livin’ in a boarding-house in a room not big enough for a mouse, just a bed with nails in the wall for clothes, one candle on the table. Ever hear of Gordon Underwear? That was my first job and they still in business.”

Lily smiled encouragingly. “And when did Elmore join you?”

He was already nine years old, Mrs. Russell said, when she was settled enough to raise him. By then she had two baby daughters and a steady man with a job in the railyards.

“What was your son like?” Lily asked.

Hammond admired the way Lily was able to distract their passenger from the disaster of the morning. If she could just keep her talking for another fifteen blocks, they’d be able to get Mrs.
Selma
Russell squared away, retrieve Mrs.
Wilhelmina
Russell, and put the whole mortifying situation behind them. When Hammond was a child, his family had lived in the Wardman Park Hotel, built to house the transient military and diplomatic community in D.C. It was an elegant brick building crowned by stone pediments, with more than a thousand rooms and residential suites—a busy, soldierly world unto itself. Hammond was part of a boys-only gang of army brats that built a hideout in the labyrinthine basement of the hotel, where they made friends with the children of the Negro help, sharing cigarettes and rumors of sex, stolen treats and escape routes hidden from adult eyes that led to freedom in Rock Creek Park and the zoo. On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, they roamed together through the frenzied crowds that carried coffins and gruesome effigies of the Kaiser, searing
into Hammond’s imagination the belief that this was all due to his hero dad. A younger, black boy named Oscar had attached himself to Hammond, and whispered excitedly that he had a secret. While the rest of the world was drunk on victory, Hammond was led to a dark basement room with concrete walls lined with hundreds of ominous-looking gas meters, and then to a musty, spider-webbed corner where he and Oscar squatted down to watch a gray-striped alley cat giving birth.

Segregation had been a fact of childhood in Washington, D.C., and Hammond knew of course that troops were separated in the army, but he saw for the first time, in the case of Mrs. Russell, how distressing it was that real equality seemed achievable only by children, underground.

“Elmore?” Mrs. Russell smiled and clicked her tongue. “The world weren’t ready for Elmore.”

“What do you mean?” Hammond prompted, doing his share.

“He a special child. The way he was born, his mouth weren’t right, so he got teased a lot, but he fight back. He was a good fighter. I tell him he the same as everybody else. You got a beautiful heart and Jesus love you. And your mama, she love you best of all.”

“How did he get in the army?” Hammond wondered.

“We don’t pay much attention to the war at first, it so far away. But when the president say everyone in the country has to get involved one hundred percent, Elmore was ready to answer the call of duty. I say, Honey, it ain’t our fight, but a man come to the church and say all these good things about the army, how they can fix Elmore mouth for him. And that’s exactly what they do.”

“They did the surgery?” Lily guessed it was a simple operation of the type that should have been done when he was a baby.

Mrs. Russell told them how different Elmore looked afterward. Like he’d been waiting all his life to inhabit that uniform and that smile.

“They send him to France right away, and put him to work in a special unit call Service of Supply. He not too happy, say he rather be holding a rifle instead of the dead bodies they have him carry, but I say someone gots to.”

Hammond shifted uncomfortably in the overheated cab. He knew the SOS was an all-Negro unit where the soldiers were used as laborers, but wouldn’t dare say anything to dim Mrs. Russell’s pride.

“Anyways,” Mrs. Russell was saying, “he take to the army like a fish to water and decide that when he come home, he’s going into officer training school for colored folks. That the last I hear, even though it was a whole year later when I got the letter.”

They rode in silence. Mrs. Russell’s lithe brown fingers with red nails were calmly folded over the clasp of her purse. Her gaze was distant.

“I talk to Elmore every day. He tell me, Don’t worry, Mama, I’m all right. I’m here with Jesus. I say, I know it, son. The Lord made you whole so you’d be ready to take Jesus’s hand.”

She opened the purse and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

Lily breathed, “Amen,” mostly to herself, but Hammond found his throat was strangled. He was over his head when it came to female emotion, useless, miscast in a maudlin drama where he didn’t know the lines. He’d never even seen his mother cry. She did, of course, but not in front of the children. He recalled the one time she had really broken down, when they had to leave her childhood home in North Carolina to move to Washington, D.C., for his father’s new posting. Hammond remembered being kept apart from his mother’s helpless sobbing by a clean white door.

The taxi let them out at 135th Street in front of a newly built red-brick building eleven stories high. The tower was the tallest in the immediate skyline. It was a less grand version of the Hotel Commodore but with the same design of two wings capped by American flags. The main entrance was a humble doorway, but inside the floor was freshly waxed and there was a mural of African dancers in spokes of sunlight coming through jungle vines. The attendant who greeted them was a clean-cut young man in a short-sleeved shirt and bow tie who looked like he might have just come from church.

“I’ll take you to your room, missus, and you can put up your feet.”

Hammond felt it was his duty to sign off on behalf of the army.

“I hope all goes well for you, Mrs. Russell.”

“Be a good boy,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She was tired; you could see the fight blown out of her. The attendant was encouraging.
“You’re almost there. Just a little farther now.”
Lily saw that Hammond was bewildered, hands limp at his sides. In his world, efficiency won the day—in sports and on the battlefield. If you studied the rules and learned to seize the advantage, things would unfold pretty much according to expectation. But it seemed the clock had stopped, leaving him suspended between the action, unaccustomed to the dead quiet of a strange halftime in which certain powers that could not be accounted for were somehow deciding the game. Watching Mrs. Selma Russell shuffle slowly toward the elevator, leaning hard on the attendant’s arm, Hammond realized he had lost track of the goal.

Lily was simply practical. “Let’s find Wilhelmina,” she said, and asked a passing resident where the dining hall might be.

They were shown into a plain room of square tables and ladder-back chairs. It was just before lunch, and cooks were setting up steam trays. There were slices of ham and grits and glazed sweet potatoes. No waiters in white jackets. No menu with many choices or lofty windows overlooking a plaza. The black pilgrims were to bus their own dishes and pile them on trays. It was easy to spot Mrs. Wilhelmina Russell. She was sitting alone, the only white face they had seen since they’d passed 125th Street.

“Don’t worry, everything’s taken care of,” Hammond said.

Wilhelmina’s eyes wavered back and forth across the empty room. “But I’m about to have lunch with my friends.”

She was a lanky person—at one time a competitive tennis player—whose face had grown loose and horsey. Her tawny hair was faded by the sun; she had pale irises and eyebrows. She wore a pink rayon blouse with mismatched buttons that was not closed properly.

“Let me fix that,” offered Lily, but the lady slapped her hand away.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

“We’re from the army,” Hammond said for the second time,
becoming worried that he wasn’t getting through. “And we’re taking you to your hotel.”

From her wide-eyed reaction, Hammond wondered if he’d phrased that in the best possible way. Maybe she thought anyone in uniform was the Reichswehr.

“There’s a taxi waiting, just outside,” he assured her.

“This is my hotel.”

“No, you see, there’s been a mistake.”

Someone had carefully hung Wilhelmina’s white sweater on the back of the chair as if to protect the heavy beaded appliqué of a pink carnation. Lily picked it up and discovered there was a handwritten note safety-pinned to the collar.

“Oh, that’s for you,” Wilhelmina said offhandedly.

Lily undid the note and read out loud:
“To Whom It May Concern: My wife, Mrs. Wilhelmina Russell, is not in a normal state of mind. She has just been released from the Maine Insane Asylum. Please see that she gets medical care. Please wire me at W. J. Russell & Crampton, Boston, if she causes any damage. Sincerely, Warren J. Russell. P.S. A bromide will help her headaches.”

“It’s a sweet letter?” Wilhelmina said. “Isn’t it?”

“Very sweet,” Lily assured her, although her mind was racing with this new information.

“He’s screwing a girl half his age,” Wilhelmina added calmly.

“Your sweater is beautiful,” Lily managed, not knowing what to say.

Wilhelmina seemed relaxed and unaffected by the revelation of her husband’s infidelity.

“Do you like the appliqué?” she asked. “I made it in the hospital. This is what I’m doing now,” she said, and pulled two needles and a piece of curling yellow knitting from a canvas bag.