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