The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (3 page)

Within a week of Judith’s arrival an army of men descended on the house in squadlike formations. There were the plumbers, the electricians, the heating guys, the painters, the roofers, and the architect, who always came dressed in a well-tailored suit and stood leaning against the side of his silver Mercedes with a yellow hard hat on. Almost all of the men who worked on the house came into my store during their lunch breaks to buy a few dollars’ worth of junk food. They were as reliable as the Jehovah’s Witnesses who still made their weekly rounds across the neighborhood. And while I knew the workers would come and go, I took their presence at the time as a sign that things were improving, that the neighborhood was getting better and life was on the verge of changing. It was partly because of them and what they did to the house and others in the neighborhood that I added the deli counter to my store in January, hoping that perhaps I, too, could profit from the houses that gleamed with their newly restored glory.

It was from the construction workers that I first found out some of the details of Judith’s life—details that could, of course, come only from people who know your home so intimately they inevitably believe they’ve come to know something of you as well. Through them I learned that the woman was a lesbian bitch with too much money on her hands. She was fucking the architect on the side (you could tell by the way they always went off to some room when she came by), which explained why he was such a bastard himself and why he probably got the job. She wanted a bathroom on every floor of the house, which made no goddamn sense because why the fuck would she need four bathrooms when only two people would be living there? Her library was an entire floor and she wanted the whole thing with built-in bookcases and sliding doors to cover them. What kind of fucking person needed doors to cover their books? And her bedroom? It was half of the third floor. A whole fucking family could live in a room that size. There was no husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend, but she was a lesbian, you could bet on that. All you had to do was look at that short hair and nearly flat chest to see it.

It wasn’t until the end of that September that I finally met the woman I had described to Joseph and Kenneth as tall and white. Until then I had seen her only once, in passing, out my bedroom window as she stood on the steps of the house and stared up at the roof. At first I had assumed that she was an agent of some city bureaucracy, assigned to the neighborhood to report on the condition of its aging buildings, to determine whether they were in need of repair or demolishment. Before Judith, these were the only reasons white people had ever come into the neighborhood: to deliver official notices, investigate crimes, and check up on the children of negligent parents. It wasn’t until she began to rub her hand along the banister and chip away at the crumbling black paint that I realized her interest in the house was purely personal. She foraged through her purse, pulled out a set of keys, and nudged the door open with her shoulder: irrefutable signs of ownership.

Judith was sitting on the bottom steps of the house on an early fall afternoon with a little girl leaning back in between her legs when I came out of my house. I was dressed for a wedding, and as I turned to lock the door behind me, I heard her say, “What a beautiful garment.” Her use of the word “garment” struck me most—it was polite, almost formal, as if the word had been inserted into her sentence at the last possible moment out of an instinctive sense of cultural diplomacy. I was dressed entirely in white. I had on white pants, with a white shirt that had a crucifix embroidered down the middle, over which I wore a finely woven shroud of white cotton. It was an outfit that meant nothing here, stripped as it was of all context. On the rare occasions that I still wore it, I did so expecting the taunts and stares of my neighbors and their children.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What’s it made of?”

“Cotton.”

“Special occasion?”

“A wedding.”

“Not your own, is it?”

“No. A cousin’s.”

She introduced herself by pointing to the house behind her and telling me she had just moved in. Her name, Judith—Judy—was the English counterpart to my cousin’s name—Yodit. When I pointed that out she shook her head, bit down on her lower lip, and said, “No, no. That’s much prettier than Judith. Much prettier.” She was tall and narrow, with skinny arms and short brown hair cut just above her shoulders. She had a slightly crooked mouth and full lips that marked her face in a peculiar way. They made her mouth seem too large for her face, and her face too small for her head, so that there was something almost doll-like about her.

“You’re right,” I said. “It is.”

We both pretended to laugh, after which she introduced me to her daughter, Naomi, a small, pretty girl with a skin tone closer to mine than her mother’s.

“She’s beautiful,” I told her.

“Yes. You’re right. She is,” she said. She rubbed her hands over her daughter’s head and then whispered something into her ear. The girl leaned her head back, looked up at her mother, and smiled. I could see the resemblance then. It was in the narrow angle of their faces, both of which sloped down into a smooth, pointed chin. When the girl turned back around and faced me I felt a hint of embarrassment and shame come over me. I knew I was being judged by this child as she refused to avert her gaze from mine.

The cab I had called to take me to the wedding pulled up then. It was an expense that I couldn’t afford, but one that had nonetheless been demanded of me by the occasion. Judith and I said good-bye, it was nice to meet you, and then I was off to my cousin’s wedding—a woman ten years younger than me, and of no real relationship to me beyond an affinity that our fathers had shared for each other in Ethiopia. After the wedding the photographs were taken at the National Botanical Gardens, most inside the greenhouse, in the shadow of yellow, purple, and red flora so large as to seem comical. There my cousin and her new husband met another newlywed Ethiopian couple also posing for pictures. They took three together, the two brides and two grooms standing on opposite sides of a blooming purple bush. And later that evening, during the reception, we heard that the same groom who had been standing on the opposite side of that bush only two hours earlier had died in the middle of his own reception.

Everyone grew somber when they heard the news whispered at their table. If there was one thing we all knew how to do, it was pay our respects to the dead. We all shook our heads, mumbled parts of the same prayers we had used for our fathers and friends, and then moved on, grateful in the way only other people’s tragedies can make you.

Once construction on Judith’s house had progressed far enough for her to move in near the end of October, I began to see her around the neighborhood more often. I often saw her reading on one of the benches across from General Logan on a late fall afternoon, undisturbed by the drunk men sleeping or stumbling around her. A whirlwind of fallen leaves and trash would occasionally rise around the base of Logan’s statue and flit about in the air as if deliberately calling attention to itself. Judith, however, looked as indifferent to her surroundings as General Logan did on his horse, her legs properly crossed, one shoe dangling just slightly from her foot as she turned her head with the flip of each page. I admired her from a distance; the way she sat, confident and oblivious to the world, her hair sometimes caught in a gust of wind to reveal the long, elegant lines of her neck. She would sweep her hair back with one clean gesture that suggested unbroken concentration on whatever was in front of her.

She began to stop by the store on random afternoons to pick up a carton of milk or a piece of candy for her daughter, and we would chat briefly about the weather, the neighborhood, children.

“Do you have any?” she asked me once.

“None that I’ll acknowledge. But I’m working on it.”

“Too bad. It’s easier if you know them.”

“I’ll try and remember that next time.”

We waved to each other from across the circle and extended our conversations with each other whenever our paths crossed coming in or out of our houses. I wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood to notice her. Of all the white people who had moved into Logan Circle over the past six months, she was the most visible, and not just because she spent her afternoons reading in the circle, or because she occasionally shopped in my store. It was Naomi, with her lighter than black but darker than white skin, sitting next to her on a bench, or walking with her hand in hand, who made people notice.

Mrs. Davis, who lived alone one floor below me, was the first to say something. It was the beginning of November and Judith had fully settled into her new home and become a fixture around the neighborhood. Her routine was familiar to those of us who watched. She was prone to midafternoon runs and reading in her living room with the curtains pulled back. The house looked beautiful now, especially at night with the single porch bulb shining down on the steps, which had also been smoothed out and worked over.

“You know that woman living next door?”

Mrs. Davis was standing outside as she normally did, leaning against the front fence, surveying every person and car that passed before her with what she believed was a keen and watchful eye for all things suspicious. For twenty-three years she had lived in this neighborhood, thirteen of which were spent in this house, first alone, and then with her husband, who passed away eight years ago. Over the years I had watched her go to church two, sometimes three times a week just, I believe, so she could escape the deafening silence that came with living alone in old age. In the summer she made feeble, halfhearted attempts at planting flowers in the weed-ridden patch of soil in front of the house. A geranium or tulip would bloom, only to die of neglect. In the fall and spring she stood outside and watched the children walk home from school with their arms around each other, and in the winter you could sometimes spot her wrapped in a blanket sitting on the couch nearest the front windows simply staring out vacantly onto the empty sidewalk and street, as if something only she remembered had occurred there, and now was the hour designated for remembering it. She had a habit of spitting out bits of food trapped between her teeth as she spoke to you, and in desperate moments of restlessness she was known to sweep the sidewalks and street free of litter. Anyone who didn’t know her well and saw her pushing a broom back and forth from the front of her house to the curb thought she was mad. Those of us who knew her realized she was not mad, only bored and looking for the attention of her neighbors.

When Mrs. Davis asked me about Judith, she already knew the answer. I had caught her on several occasions watching us talk from her living-room window. She couldn’t help smiling her perfect, wide smile to remind me of that.

“Yes, Mrs. Davis. I know her.”

“Why do you think a woman like that would wanna live here? Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

She had a small face with tightly bundled features, her eyes and nose closely set together, as if they had failed to grow since she was a child. When she asked me questions she rapped her fingers against the fence, showing off her hands, which had aged even better than the rest of her.

“It’s a free country, Mrs. Davis. People can live where they like.”

“What do you know about free countries? You didn’t even know what that was till you came here last week, and now you’re telling me people can live where they like. This isn’t like living in a hut, you know. People around here can’t just put their houses on their backs and move on.”

She tried not to laugh at her own joke, but failed, and her face disappeared once more under a row of shining, perfect white teeth.

“What can you do? The neighborhood’s changing,” I told her. I had said the same thing at least a dozen times before, when the first few houses in the neighborhood were sold, when a restaurant opened up a few blocks away, when up the street the discount grocery store with two rows dedicated solely to generic goods shut down. The neighborhood’s changing, things are changing, it’s not like it used to be, I can’t believe how much it’s changed, who would have thought it could change so quickly, nothing is permanent, everything changes; the passive and helpless observations of people stuck living on the sidelines.

The change wasn’t gradual, or rapid, but somewhere in between. Two years ago I would spot the occasional odd face walking past my storefront windows—a white woman carrying groceries home early in the evening, a man jogging with his dog shortly after dusk—and think little of it. It wasn’t until the summer before Judith moved into the neighborhood that the change began in earnest, which is to say it became inevitable. Moving vans began to arrive on some of the blocks on the first of every month—the long, full-length professional ones that came fully loaded with overweight men wearing shirts barely large enough to stretch over their swollen guts. I spent most of one Sunday afternoon in July watching them move furniture into a house just outside the circle, less than a hundred feet away from my store. They unloaded two gilded mirrors and an antique desk, along with a pair of sofas with pillows so large and comfortable that I imagined myself asking if I could sit, for just a few minutes. A handful of other people were watching with me from the other side of the street. The entire time we stood out there I heard only one person say anything at all, nothing more than a simple phrase, “white people.”

“You spend all day in that store by yourself and that’s all you got to say,” Mrs. Davis said.

“Unfortunately, yes. Can I get you anything tomorrow?”

“Get me some milk. I don’t want nothing that’s expired, though. I may be old but that doesn’t mean I want my milk to be.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Davis.”

She stepped to the side and let me pass through the gate, kissing me once on the cheek as I went by.

A few days later, Naomi came into the store by herself. It was the first time I had seen her without her mother. On the few occasions Judith had brought her to the store, Naomi had simply stood quietly next to the door, hands clasped behind her back as she surveyed the contents of the aisle in front of her. I had asked her once if she wanted to come inside and take a look around. Her response had been swift and definitive.