Finnerty stood with his head slightly bent, his brow lined by doubt.
‘Did you lose something, Oliver?’
‘My key,’ he told her, ‘I lost my key.’
‘
My
key I take it you mean.’
‘
Your
key.’
‘It’s laying in your cuff. You got a hole in your pocket. Bring your pants up later and I’ll make you a new pocket.’
Had he actually appeared with the pants she would have sewed both pockets to the seat, but he gave her no such chance.
It was Mama upon whom he conferred that opportunity, Hallie was later mildly surprised to discover. There she was, the bespectacled mulatto housekeeper-informer with gray in her poll, a rosary around her throat and Finnerty’s boy-size trousers across her knees, plying needle and thread as though she were his mother. ‘I’m putting in a new pocket for Oliver,’ she explained, chattering on as the needle plied. ‘Oh, I know people say a pimp is the most pitiful shame, but little they know what such a man has to go through for his hustler’s sake. What if she’s sick or in jail? Who else has the poor thing to stand by her side?
‘Oliver didn’t invent his trade no more than we invented ours. I never heard of a pimp being elected mayor nor even of one who bothered to vote, so why blame
them
for the way things are? They weren’t the ones who made the laws that let the trade go on. If nobody wanted there to be pimps, honey, there wouldn’t be no pimps. Isn’t it strange that it’s the very ones who say we’re a public disgrace who pay us best? You know yourself that it’s the ones from the Department who come down early on Saturdays to holler, “Bring us two women and a bottle!”’
‘What’s wrong about two women and a bottle?’ Hallie asked, just to find out.
‘Honey, there’s nothing wrong with two women and a bottle, or three or four women and a whole case, so long as you don’t sneak it and preach against it the next day.’ Mama wetted the thread and pointed it through the needle. ‘If there was another craft open to Oliver he’d try it, and make quite a success.’
Sometimes Hallie wondered a bit about Mama.
For how disapproving Mama looked later, in the kitchen, while Reba and Finnerty were having a bite together.
‘Are you having coffee, baby?’ she heard Finnerty invite Reba.
‘Yes, daddy.’
‘Then make enough for two and bring mine here.’
‘Alright, daddy,’ Old Faithful agreed, ‘but butter me a little piece bread. After all, I work for you.’
Reba had been brought up in a Chicago orphanage although both her parents were living. They had taken turns visiting her on alternate Sundays – but one Sunday neither had come. ‘See,’ one of the other girls had told her then, ‘your father’s no good,’ – and had shoved Reba’s head against a flathead nail. The accident had caused a permanent squint in the girl’s right eye.
Now she had found a sort of father, one who was surely no good at all, but at least he came to visit her every day and sometimes twice. It was ‘My Oliver this, my Oliver that’ and ‘My Oliver is just so
tickled
with them raw silk lounging pajamas I bought him he been lounging two whole days so I’m going to get him cowboy boots to go with them. Won’t that be
cute?
’
‘Not the way I heard it it aint cute,’ the big girl from Fort Worth needled her. ‘How I heard it, you’ve been hiding them pants to keep him from loading up a sheeny wagon of green bananas and making hisself a nice profit by the time he got to Chicago.’
‘If my Oliver ever worked a sheeny wagon I’ll kiss your ass before God!’ Reba came swiftly to the defense of her household honor. ‘His whole life he aint worked one single mothering day! Never rolled up his sleeves except to exercise horses a little. Even then he was just
settin
’ up there, takin’ his own good time. Why, he won’t even take off his own shoes to climb in bed!’
That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street.
‘Any pimp whose broad don’t take off his shoes for him,’ Finnerty backed up Reba, ‘I defy him to claim he got good conditions.’
‘Oh, who cares what conditions you and your old lady got?’ the Fort Worth blonde dismissed them both. ‘Why,
I
got a daddy friend don’t take a dime off me. He buys
me
things. He’s going to buy me a Cadillac so long I’ll have to back up to turn a corner.’ Whatever Fort Worth’s real name was, no one ever called her anything but Five, to honor a navel formed to that figure. When asked to show her wonderful navel she would show it, sweetly and simply, just like that. Men pinched her bottom, yet she did not hold herself proudly just because of that.
No chicken farm story was likely to catch Five. She had been brought up on one, and had had enough of
that
. Yet she was wide open to the Cadillac story, which was nothing more than the chicken farm story on wheels.
Oh, that long easy rider with the real careful driver. When promises would buy Cadillacs, Five would own a whole fleet.
Until that time Five would go on her feet.
The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them.
‘If it weren’t for Mama who’d take
our
side?’ Frenchy demanded to know, and stick up for them Mama did. She took their side against Oliver, ordered him out of her house, and told him not to come back till he could show respect to ladies and forced him to apologize to one or the other at least once a week.
A cruel game, tricking children. For one word from Finnerty would be enough to send the woman back to the alley stalls from which she’d risen. Colored women were not legally permitted to manage houses employing white prostitutes. But every house was required to keep a maid on the premises during working hours. To the police therefore Mama was a maid. This was Finnerty’s arrangement, and he didn’t let her forget it for a day.
Leaving Mama troubled by the part she played. At times she tried to justify herself by remembering that she had been deceived by many white men; therefore it was only fair that she should now deceive their daughters. Yet disappointment wide as the world would surprise her out of her sleep: When had she ceased to belong to herself? Some mornings she would have to go for the cognac before she could go downstairs and say, ‘How is my chick today?’ to each and every one.
Between forenoon and evening her chicks descended the stairwell like separate blessings, one by one.
Hallie came down first, with a cup of tea steaming in her hand and the brindle cat limping at her side. It was a cat that took offense at nothing simply to have some sort of life. It walked beside her down the stone, but when it felt dew beneath its paws it drew back. Then Hallie would point her foot, the cat would leap, hobble and claw its way clear to her shoulder. Then they went together to say good morning to the jonquils growing between the cobbles. Though between the cobbles of Hallie’s heart no jonquil would grow again.
A heart like a lonesome gravestone, winter weeds covered it now. Below the weeds the child lay buried who had been but three when he’d died. One who had surprised his mother that sad and sudden fall by asking ‘Mother, are my mittens ready for winter? Are my earlaps ready? Will my coat be warm?’
His last Christmas he had put a hand behind a glowing ornament, passing it about his face, dreamily taking up the heat until she had made him stop.
Now nine shuttered Christmases later she walked powdered, Maybellined and gowned in the mascaraed evening light and something swollen in a mushroom’s shape, boredom like a living growth, bore down on her heart and brain.
Morning was not the hardest time, for the lame cat needed her, and the other women were not yet about to smile a little to themselves when they talked to her: ‘How you doin’, philosopher?’ they would ask, though she could not recall who, nor why, anyone had first called her that. But she had once been a country schoolteacher, so it must have something to do with that.
‘I got no philosophy but I topped you last night,’ Frenchy especially liked to tease her.
So she and the cat went visiting jonquils, and had a bit of fur-to-ear chatter in the ancestral understanding of woman and cat. Sometimes she read, in the quiet forenoon, out of books she still loved. But when the morning was past and the cat lay stretched on the window ledge through the sweltering afternoon, then she was left alone in this strange house, and ennui came down like a foe on her mind and she shaded her eyes with her hand.
To hope she might spend her yet unspent hours bedside to bed in some common ward, under some final quarantine, some ward where go all those whose lives are untouchable, from streets for whom nobody prays. Where it is one where evening falls and one the sad return of day.
Till the violet evening had mercy at last. Then she stood in the portiere and chose what guests she would.
The other women regarded her with a strange mixture of admiration and pity. They felt she held herself apart because she had once taught school – yet at other times they perceived she was somehow defenseless against all of them. Then it was that, hearing the low grinding of metal on stone, they looked the other way to spare her, while Finnerty held the big doors wide.
They did not look, yet sensed as if the lights had gone up a bit, that at the sound of little wheels, life was beginning again in Hallie.
Her lover was the legless man.
‘I’m a philosopher, too,’ Reba challenged Hallie – ‘because I got my
own
goddamn philosophy. For instance. You take a woman married to a good man and she cheats on him. Their baby is born dead. Well she had it coming to her, didn’t she? Everyone gets what’s coming to them, that’s my philosophy. I picked it up working for loryers. They said they never heard anything like it.’
‘I can believe that,’ Hallie was inclined to agree with loryers.
‘I had to run down two flights and up one across the street to get a coke,’ Reba recalled, ‘because across the street is a whorehouse with a coke machine. Why wear myself out running stairways? A job is a job. One with cokes is better. That’s my philosophy too.’
‘Say you don’t go for cokes, you’re on hard liquor. Okay, be a B-broad and get drunk every night. Say you’re a heavy eater, a regular fat glutton, get a job as a waitress ’n stuff yourself. Say you’re rapping doors with a box of silk stockings under your arm and you start freezing. So what? Get a job as a dance-hostess and work up a sweat.
‘I got half my choppers out and no ovalries. So what? I can still be a practical nurse, can’t I? My people come from that part of Europe where they say “fis” for “fish.” I don’t know where it’s at exactly but when my mother sent me to the store she’d always say “Honey, bring back a nice piece fis.” Hey! How’d you like all the cigarettes you could smoke? Just go down to American Tobacco and give my name, they’ll give you all you can haul in one trip.’
‘Baby, I don’t know what you’re on,’ Five marveled, ‘but I never heard nothing like it neither.’
Reba read all the papers, and always shook her head when she’d finished one. Someone in South Carolina had received two boxes of poisoned candy by mail, signed merely ‘B’rer Rabbit, R.F.D.’ Now what did anyone hope to get out of poisoning somebody else by mail? ‘If you got a grudge like that hire somebody to bust his damn legs, don’t go sneaking around signing yourself a damn rabbit.’
Postal delivery poisoners were among the few who fell out of the range of her sympathy. It troubled her to read that a tenant farmer had drowned his three daughters in a well because ‘Jesus says we got to go.’ ‘If Jesus said
that
why don’t he jump in the well hisself and let Jesus decide for the babies?’ Nor was she satisfied with the explanation of the brakeman who killed his wife with a hammer. ‘Grace aint fitten to raise a dog. This is the only way I know to make a lady of her.’
‘I don’t know what people are coming to, they act like a bunch of damned pistols,’ was Reba’s reaction. When she read of a widow woman who fell and broke her leg on a downtown street and someone stole forty-eight dollars out of her purse while she lay helpless, Reba was helpless too. ‘That’s too much’ was all she had to say for that day, and threw the paper away.
One evening an actor stumbled in. ‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ he told the women as though otherwise they’d never catch on.
‘Sweetie, I seen your picture in the paper but why don’t you just go home?’ Reba asked. The next morning the actor had his picture in the paper again, having been picked up for drunk and disorderly down the street. ‘I had too much to drink’ he had repeated his explanation to reporters once more. Reba’s patience gave out.
‘“I had too much to drink.” “I had too much to drink.” What did I tell him when he was here? “Sweetie, you’ve had too much to drink” is
just
what I told him. Honest to
God
, when a man
knows
he’s had too much and goes on drinking more all the same, that’s just too much. I refuse to adjust to peasants of a environment like this, that’s all.’
The excuse of the dunce who drowned his infant daughter because his wife had run off with another man didn’t get him off the hook with Reba. ‘Something snapped in my head’ he had told the police, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘“I had too much to drink,”’ she mocked all erring mankind. ‘“Something snapped in my head,” “I didn’t know what I was doing” – of all the bum excuses. Give me animals, at least
they
know what they’re doing.’
Especially elephants. Elephants
always
knew what they were doing.
‘Do you know about elephants, how
they
come on?’ she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.