Tina Mcelroy Ansa (27 page)

For another, no matter how many changes he went through, he was still Herman to Lena. He was still the tall dark brown man who had been her love and guardian angel before she even knew it.

And Herman was a man of his word. He did nothing without first asking or moaning or groaning, “Okay, Lena?”

“Um-huh,” she answered each and every time. Like I’mo say no, she thought as he continued touching her just the way she liked.

Herman went deeper and deeper inside her, touching spots and opening doors to room after room after room that Lena had never opened to anyone. Herman roused emotions she truly had not felt before. And she was grateful then for his sweet permission-asking, “Is that okay, Lena? Uhh, how ’bout that? And that? And that?”

They lay back opposite each other on the big soft couch to catch their breath. Lena did not have to ponder another second. She knew right then she would feel this way about this man the rest of her life.

When she was able to find her voice again, she said, “Herman?”

“Yeah, baby,” he answered as he tucked one bare foot under her, threw the other over her and pulled her to him.

“You know, Herman, I think somewhere back there when we were dancing or eating or something, I decided.”

“What you decide, baby?”

Lena loved how familiar he had gotten with her so quickly.

“Herman,” she said, then paused and smiled. She loved to speak his name. “I decided I
am
your woman.”

She had never said those words to a man before. Never. She liked the sound of them so much, she said them again.

“Herman, I
am
your woman. I’m
so glad
you came.”

Lena could feel Herman smiling when he kissed her.

He lifted Lena and lay her nude body on top of his nude body—a pretty sight in the fire and candlelight—and held her close.

Slowly, Lena seemed to feel a change in her very blood chemistry. She had the sensation of barely falling—millimeter by millimeter, hardly falling. It felt to Lena as if she were sinking into the very center of the universe, a very warm and welcoming universe.

She began to perceive sparks of life all around her. The universe she was sinking into had a wide and complex life. She felt planets spinning by her in their orbits. She saw galaxies form next to her hips. Shooting stars and comets whizzed by from her vagina toward the top of her head, leaving tails of gold and red down her throat and stars in her eyes.

Herman had eased into her heart so smoothly that before she knew it, he had eased in and taken it over with old-time love.

As they lay in each other’s arms all night long, stroking each other, licking, tickling, blowing, fingering, nuzzling, Herman turned to her again and again and declared over and over, “Lena, I am much in love wid you.”

Lena—spent, sated and content—dozed on and off throughout the night, smiling through little patches of dreams of floating on blue clouds. But she awoke each time she heard Herman’s voice to reply, “Herman, I am much in love with you.”

T
he next morning, when Lena awoke nude with Herman curled up naked in bed next to her, the fire was just dying down in the bedroom hearth. She smiled into his open eyes and said a quick prayer of thanksgiving that the night before had not been a dream. She could not remember the last time she had slept all the way through the night with a man.

She could feel Herman’s hard muscular thigh resting against hers, and she noticed his leg hairs were short and wiry.

“Mornin’, Lena,” he said with a smile.

“Good morning, Herman,” she replied. She felt a little shy, a bit abashed at her exuberant lovemaking the night before with a man she had, for all practical purposes, just met. But Herman would not let her be shy or modest. When she smiled back her greeting, she could feel his penis growing against her hip. She rolled over and seemed to sink right into him.

After their lovemaking first thing in the morning, she was tempted to take the phone off the hook and spend the entire day with
Herman. But she remembered the chaos in town the day before when she was merely late, not absent. Besides, Lena was a woman with responsibilities. She had to get up and out and, as her father used to say, “meet her public.” She had
business
to take care of.

Lena’s magic in the business world was a combination of acumen, luck and just being herself.

She had wanted to explore literature in college, but as a tribute to Jonah, she decided to check out the business department and take a few courses there, too. The very first semester, she discovered she was good at this business business. Commerce, trading, numbers, dealing. Crunching numbers, moving them around, making them work for her. It seemed second nature to Lena.

Her economics professors just laughed and shook their heads at the amount of insight and imagination she brought to the study of business.

Putting together a mock takeover for a final project, Lena would look up at her assigned partner and say, “I can
see
it! Can’t you just see it?!”

Her department head was a tough-minded woman who saw Lena, her personal protégée, accomplishing all she had dreamed of doing in the field of economics. The professor could see the two of them sharing the podium as Lena accepted the Nobel Prize in economics. But at the end of her senior year, Jonah, the business world and Mulberry beckoned, and the professor saw her dreams fly off to Georgia.

When Lena returned home, Edward, the younger of her two brothers, had decided to make the Air Force his career. And her other brother, Raymond, did not seem the least bit interested in trying to out-Jonah Jonah in his own town. He had moved to Texas with his new wife Jackie who could not seem to leave her own family.

“Well, Daddy, you always did threaten Edward and Raymond with giving The Place to me,” Lena would say when she thought she saw her father down in the mouth because he did not have sons to carry on his business.

Lena didn’t have a clue. Jonah was so proud of Lena’s business sense that he had to remind himself sometimes that he had had sons, too. He was even proud of her obstinacy in business.

“Caldonia, Caldonia, what make your big head so hard?” Jonah had sung that phrase over and over when she just
wouldn’t
follow his advice. Even after Lena had proved time and time again that her business acumen was equal to or better than his, Jonah still sang the song to his smart “hardheaded” daughter.

Among Jonah’s friends, especially the men he had been playing poker with since the time Lena was born, his daughter’s business acumen was legend. The same men who had raised a glass to Lena’s birth had lived to see her buy and resell half the town.

In the midst of any deal, in the heat of bartering, Jonah would throw up both his hands and threaten, “All right, I’m a reasonable man. I’d hate to have to put my daughter on ya.”

Sometimes Lena sensed her legend growing in the town without her doing a thing.

Back in the early seventies when she was barely out of college with a fresh Realtor’s license, and an idea for her own all-female company named Candace, she was summoned to a house in East Mulberry early one morning. With her permed rust hair in a fluffy pageboy, dressed in her new soft green tweed business suit, Lena had sat at the foot of the deathbed of Miss Roberta, an old woman she barely knew. Miss Roberta had been a domestic all her life, working in hotel housekeeping as well as private homes—”in service”—for the last forty years. The only little break she had given herself was a tall cold beer on Saturdays down at The Place. Miss Roberta had explained very clearly and succinctly from the last bed she would lie in that she needed to talk some business with Lena.

Her family had gathered around her in the sturdy old house with the dusty screened porch in East Mulberry, trying hard to keep life in the woman who kept the life in their family by the sheer force of her own spirit.

Babies cried in the kitchen. Men played cards on the enclosed
back porch. Women cooked like it was Sunday and cleaned like it was any other day. Folks had traveled in cars and on buses from as far away as Mississippi to be there for this woman’s passing.

Miss Roberta had shooed everyone but her younger sister out of the room with a flicker of her eyelids when Lena arrived with two spiral-cut baked hams, three boxes of jumbo breaded shrimp and two cases of Coca-Colas in the trunk of her new Cutlass convertible. Miss Roberta looked so delicate reclining there, she was nearly translucent. Even so near death, her wrinkled brown skin seemed to glow.

“Lena, you got plenty money,” the old lady said in a surprisingly strong voice. “I want to sell you this house. I want to do it right now. And I want my money in hand before darkness fall tonight.”

Lena smiled her wide guileless sweet smile while her mind raced with calculations and legalities. Her first instinct was to say, “Do you think this is the right time to be doing this?” but she knew this was likely the
only
time Miss Roberta would get to do this.

But Lena didn’t get a chance to respond in any way. Miss Roberta’s sister jumped forward from where she was resting against the closed door and spoke sweetly to her big sister.

“Rob, now, I know what this house means to you and the family. Maybe, you should just sleep on this decision a bit more.”

Lena was picturing the house from outside and in. It was a one-story wood frame house with two screened cement porches.

“Well, Sis,” Miss Roberta said, “you know all the children gon’ lose it anyway ’cause I ain’t gonna be around to make sure the taxes are paid.”

Miss Roberta’s sister stopped where she stood and dropped her head a bit. The statement stood in the room like another person. Like a statue of Truth that no one could ignore.

“This way, I can get a good price for it, split the money according to how I want it done and the children end up with something for my efforts.”

Her sister thought it over for a moment, patted Miss Roberta’s
hand and returned to her post at the door with tears in her eyes. Lena felt like crying, too, but instead she thought, How can I help Miss Roberta? She was busy thinking, Cash, cash, cash. How much can I get my hands on tonight? I wonder how much Daddy got stashed away all over Mulberry.

“So, Miss Lena,” she said with a teasing tone in her dying voice, as if there had been no break in the conversation. “What we gonna do and when we gonna get to it?”

Lena decided the best tack to take was to act as if she were sitting in her own small office downtown.

“How much you asking, Miss Roberta?” Lena asked.

The dying woman motioned for her sister to come from her sentinel at the door. Miss Roberta had written a number on a crisp piece of yellow lined legal paper that lay folded in half on the bedside table next to a red leather-bound Bible. She handed it to her sister and nodded for her to open and read it. When this was done, she followed her sister’s directions, and with a poker face, handed it to Lena.

Lena reached forward and took the yellow paper. Before opening it, she looked to Miss Roberta on the bed and received a slight nod of approval. She had learned that from Jonah.

“Lena, baby, you know how much I like to run things,” Jonah had said to her the first year she went away to college. “Everybody is like me. We all want to run things or at least let it appear that way. Business goes much smoother when you in control, but all the other folks think they got some measure of control, too. You know what I mean?”

Lena opened the note, read the number and smiled. Shoot, she thought, I can come up with that much in cash by myself.

The deal was done before the sun set.

Lena had her first property. It grew from there.

“Don’t worry ’bout your house. Lena McPherson take care of you.” It was said over and over, making Lena richer and richer.

Lena felt as if she were always like Ezekiel, standing in the gap.
She couldn’t get over the feeling that she was called to hold the folks in her town, her people, in the cup of her hand, to stand in the gap between them and disaster. Considering the kind of attention she had gotten all her life, she figured she owed people that.

Lena was the executrix of so many people’s estates that the probate judge, a white-haired white man named Stanley Booth, finally called her into his chambers.

“Ms. McPherson, now, I know you and I know your daddy, so I don’t mean any offense to you. But aren’t you in a whole lot of people’s inheritances?”

It was true. Lena had been too busy taking care of things to give it a lot of thought, but she was in a whole lot of people’s business.

Folks brought her their papers and property, their problems and their perplexities, their hopes and dreams.

“Sell it for me, Lena.”

“Don’t let our family lose it, Lena.”

“Lena, what should I do with the tax refund money?”

And she always seemed to know what to do. At first, just a little twenty-one-year-old cute woman with a degree in economics from a small southern Catholic university not known for its school of business, Lena was afraid to trust her instincts. She had spent most of her life learning over and over that the last thing she could rely on was her skewed instincts. But it seemed in business, she couldn’t go wrong following her feelings.

Her grandmother had told her, “Always follow your first mind, Lena.”

And her first mind had always told her to give.

She was solace. She was balm. She was love. She was the baby.

Lena didn’t like it, but she could feel the presence of death nearby. She didn’t even need a sign like a bird in the house or the hooting of an owl during the day. It was almost like a fog or a mist about to settle on a person or a house or an area. Not cold and damp, the way some folks thought. It was just light, dry, wispy and nearly intangible like a vapor.

Lena had felt death around the house as she had sat there dickering with Miss Roberta. In her brief years on this earth, Lena had been present at all kinds of deaths. But it was not something that she would have chosen to do. It was hard on her, these deaths at which she presided.