The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (19 page)

12:30 P.M.

The doorbell gonged. Alice hurried to the top of the stairs and peered down as Eudine opened the door. Billy! He hadn’t come to see her in weeks. He did look well, taller somehow. Alice caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror as she ran downstairs: hair still in pin curls, face still unwashed. She didn’t like for Billups to see her unkempt, but what a joy, what a wonder that he had come.

“Billy!” She raced downstairs to greet him. “Eudine! Tea,” she called.

Alice took her brother’s arm and led him into the living room. “I’ve been thinking about you every minute. I went by your apartment this morning and you weren’t there. The party’s tonight. Did you forget?” She paused and stepped back to appraise him. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Alice,” he said.

“Why are you standing around with your coat on?”

“You didn’t give me a chance …”

“Well, you look so fit. I can’t imagine what you’ve been doing these last weeks! Is this coat new? It’s very nice. Where did you get it?”

“Alice, I need—”

“Navy. Well, I prefer black or gray for a man’s coat. I always buy you black or grey but … Did Royce give it to you? He has so many things. You ought to look through some of his old suits. You’ll need to let them out, but—”

“Alice! Alice, please. I want to talk to you.”

“Talk to me? My goodness but you sound so serious. What on earth about? It’s not even lunchtime. Too early to be so grave, Billy!”

“It’s 12:30, Alice.”

“Is it? So late as that? The day is getting away from me! And so much left to do.” She looked around the room. Eudine had set out the bottles that didn’t require chilling, and she’d put out the good ashtrays and stacked pewter coasters on the side tables. Alice leapt up from the sofa with a little gasp. “I’ve got to get in the bath. You’ll wait, Billy?”

“Tea,” Eudine announced, entering the living room with the tea things on a silver tray.

“Well, I …” Alice said, looking from Eudine to the stairs and back. “I suppose I have time for just one cup.”

“I need to talk to you,” Billups said again.

“Oh, Billy! I didn’t tell you.” Alice waited for Eudine to leave the room. She sat next to Billups and said quietly, “I saw him this morning, on the steps outside of my church. He was wearing that same fedora.”

Billups tensed.

“I’d know him anywhere,” Alice whispered. “I didn’t say anything. I should have said something.”

“It wasn’t him,” Billups said.

“It
was
him,” Alice replied.

“Please, Alice. Can we talk about something else?”

Alice’s Thomas sightings upset her brother. Most she did not tell him about. In the last year she’d seen Thomas near her favorite shoe shop and outside of Bonwit Teller downtown. He hadn’t aged, but then some people are preserved in the appearance of youth for years and years.

“Those clicking heels, Billy. I went running straight to your apartment, to warn you he was near.” Alice could almost smell the angel food cake Thomas had made them eat every week when she and Billups went to his house. Alice locked alone in the parlor, Billups in the kitchen with Thomas.

“I thought I was going to vomit,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

Alice leaned forward in her chair. “What would you do if you saw him now?”

Billups didn’t answer.

“What would you do?” Alice said.

“Nothing,” Billups said.

“What if he tried to talk to you, then what?” she insisted.

“Nothing!”

Billups’s hands shook. He had such large, strong hands. In winter they were cracked and ashy and hard looking. If Billups saw Thomas now, surely he would kill him with those hands; he would beat him until he was a tomato someone had stepped on. It was terrible to see a tremor in his mighty hands.

As Billups lowered his teacup to the tray on the coffee table, it slid from the saucer and cracked on the wood floor.

“Oh, my poor Billy!” Alice said. Billups balled his hands into fists in his lap. He looked as though he were going to cry. The puddle of spilled tea spread toward the Persian rug.

“Eudine!” Alice called. “Eudine!”

She appeared with a bucket and rag and got on her knees to sop up the mess. She looked up at Billups. Alice saw something in her eyes. Judgment? Pity? “I’ll thank you to keep to your task, Eudine,” she said.

“Alice!” Billy cried.

Alice put her arms around her brother. He stiffened in her embrace.

“He’s cursed by God. I believe that,” she said. “He was limping, did I tell you? He probably had an accident or—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” Billups shouted.

Mother and Daddy, their sisters and brothers, none of them took care of Billups. She didn’t expect them to understand what he needed, she and Billy had never told anyone about Thomas. It was Alice who comforted her brother through his night terrors, Alice who’d found him an apartment in the good part of town and helped him pay the rent, Alice who kept him in nice clothes, the best clothes. She knew he needed looking after even when he insisted he didn’t. She was all he had. It took all of Alice’s strength not to call after Billups when he slammed the front door behind him.

1:30 P.M.

After two attempts, Eudine had stopped calling up the stairs to consult Alice about arrangements for the party. Just as well, Eudine managed it all expertly, and anyway Alice couldn’t face her just then. Instead, she inspected the rooms of the second floor, though most of them were unused and didn’t need cleaning. What could Billups have wanted to talk to her about, Alice wondered, as she passed from spare bath to guest bedroom. She did not like that he had something to tell her that she didn’t already know. She used to know everything about him. They had always been united. Royce’s meddling was driving Billy away from her. He said Billups’s only real problem was that he indulged his dark moods, and he advised increased daily activity and physical exercise. Ridiculous. Royce was so intent on uplifting the race that he saw everyone as an improvement project.

Royce volunteered his services in the slums and donated to the SCLC and Edward Brooke’s campaign. Of course, he also had his shirts sent from London. When he discovered Alice used a colored tailor near Wayne Street, he’d told his mother, who’d bustled her off to a shop downtown where the white seamstress was contemptuous even as she kneeled at Alice’s feet to pin her hem. Royce’s people were bitter and triumphant, they were as cold as the furthest star. Alice mistook their airs for invulnerability. How she yearned to be like them! And how she hated them—five years she’d been trying to please them and still they treated her like a dog that couldn’t quite be trained.

Royce wanted to have a child. He’d converted one of the spare bedrooms to a nursery just after they married. He wouldn’t allow anyone in there now. Alice opened the door with the key he kept in the bottom of his sock drawer. The walls were papered with yellow ducks in rain hats, fine for a boy or a girl, he’d said. No child came. Royce sulked and he blamed. In desperation, he took Alice to specialists in New York and Boston. Alice’s childlessness was the only thing about which he’d ever displayed genuine emotion—but in this he would not have his way. Alice made sure of it. This was not an act of aggression, Alice told herself when she opened the new packet of pills each month. She was only buying time until things between them were better. And she was still a young woman. There were plenty of years, so many years. As she walked out of the nursery, Alice tucked the key in the pocket of her robe. She left the door wide open.

The sewing room was at the end of the hallway. After it was outfitted, Alice quickly lost interest, but she kept the machine and cushions and bobbins because they reminded her of the little corner in the living room on Wayne Street where Hattie had set up a second-hand machine. Mother would have wanted a sewing room back then. Hattie hated Wayne Street. She said they were crammed in like rats in a hole. She couldn’t stand its shabbiness. Every couple of years she painted the living room a fanciful color: antique rose or Casanova blue or sea breeze green.

A few months before, Hattie had taken Alice to see a house she’d hoped to buy. There had been so many hoped-for houses over the years. The place wasn’t much bigger than Wayne Street, but it didn’t need to be; most of the children were grown up and gone. Hattie led Alice through the rooms. “Finally!” she kept saying. “Finally!” She was to sign the papers at the bank in two days’ time. It was absurd to rely on August to put up his share, but Hattie was bitterly disappointed when the sale fell through. And she wouldn’t accept Alice’s help. Foolish pride, not money, stood between Hattie and the only thing she’d ever admitted to wanting.

All of their lives the Shepherd children had heard Hattie declare the family diminished because they didn’t own their home. Renting made them poor and common. They were defenseless, Hattie said, and subject to the whims of the landlord. “All these years,” Alice once overheard her say to August, “and we’ve accomplished nothing. Don’t you want to have something to give our children?”

When Alice was a child, Hattie would periodically calculate the amount she’d paid in rent in the course of her years on Wayne Street. Days afterward, she’d roar through the house gesturing at the cracks in the bathtub or the nicked and dingy baseboards. These rages were dangerous. She switched Franklin because he left a window open during a rainstorm and the bedroom floor warped. He was only eight at the time. Hattie dragged him into the hallway and hit him until he urinated on himself from the fear and the pain. Alice applied Mercurochrome to the welts for a week.

It must gall Mother to come here, Alice thought. All of these bedrooms and parlors and not a child in sight. All of those rooms filled with her fine things. Alice returned to her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands limp in her lap. The party would begin at nine, and next week or next month there would be another gathering, and eventually another and on and on and on—so many conversations to be had in all of these rooms, so much chatting and hosting and pretending to be done. Alice couldn’t imagine she’d ever be adequate to the years ahead of her. She felt the house around her as if it were a great maw that had swallowed her whole.

3:00 P.M.

Alice stepped from the tub, skin tingling from the heat of her bath. She spritzed on her favorite gardenia perfume and selected her jewelry: the diamond and platinum choker, her tennis bracelet, pearls for her ears. She stood naked in the mirror—the jewels buoyed her, they made her courageous. I am a wealthy woman, she thought. I don’t have to be afraid of anyone anymore. Alice put on her slip and bathrobe and went downstairs to tell Eudine she’d need her party dress.

The ironing room door stood open. Alice crossed the kitchen and went in. The back window was steamed over, but Alice could just make out a brilliant red bird perched on a bare branch of the backyard’s oak. When Alice turned her head and saw Billups and Eudine all wrapped around each other, she nearly said, “Isn’t that something? A cardinal in February!” Because both bird and embrace were impossible, Alice thought she’d imagined them and she squeezed her eyes shut. She looked again and the bird was gone. But there was Eudine smoothing her hair and Billups springing away from her and clearing his throat. Alice stepped backward into the kitchen. She was so flustered she stammered, “Excuse me.” As though it were she who had done something she shouldn’t.

Billups came into the kitchen. “I’ve been … I was trying to tell you. We, we’re …” He faltered. He looked at Eudine, who’d followed him out of the ironing room and stood a few feet away. She nodded at Billups in encouragement; when he returned his gaze to Alice, there was something light and lifting in his eyes.

“We’re going together,” he said.

Alice couldn’t stand the authority in his voice. The declaration of this thing he’d done behind her back, this decision he’d made without consulting her. Eudine held her chin high; her eyes were fixed on Billups as though Alice were not there.

Alice half turned toward her. “Snake,” she whispered. “Jezebel.”

Eudine tugged at the bib of her apron, though it was already straight, and said, “I think I better go. This is between y’all.”

“You ought to be ashamed!” Alice shouted. She started down the hall after Eudine. Billups blocked her path.

“It’s out now, so we may as well … I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been trying to tell you,” Billups looked around the room as though something could save him from this discussion, as if something might scoop him up and fly him away from his sister.

“I’m moving next week. I found a place I can afford on my”—Billups hesitated—“on my salary.”

Alice stood in front her brother shaking like a terrier, but she didn’t say a word.

“Alice? Alice?” he said. “Maybe I should go. I guess this isn’t the best time, with the party and everything.”

“This is what I’m talking about, Billy,” she said at last. Her voice was low and strained. “You can’t make right decisions. A tryst with the maid? And moving? To what neighborhood? You can’t afford anywhere nice.”

“I got a job. I’m the new filing clerk at Girard Hospital, $5,600 annual salary. I’m done with part-time and switching from one thing to the next.”