All the Finest Girls (9 page)

The idea rushes my senses, making me sick with the sudden excitement.

For once I am not last.

“Therefore will I save my flock, and they shall no more be a prey …”

In the back of the church, a baby begins to cry.

“And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them …”

Sunlight filters through the red and gold stained glass on one side of the church, spilling colored light across the floorboards, playing across Mrs. Chisolm’s green hat, casting a picture on the far wall like a slide show. A woman holding her baby, the baby Jesus, I think, both of their heads surrounded by crowns of gold. Their skin, made of dusky triangles of glass, is neither dark nor light. Heat from the sun waves the picture against the wall, like water, and I imagine swimming in the currents of color.

“And the tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase …”

I am lost in the gold, the amber, and green. Organ music begins again and Louise is tugging at my arm. The people are on their feet.

“Joyful, joyful, we adore thee … ,” they all begin to sing. Louise sings too. I don’t understand how she knows the same words to the same song when she’s never been here before. It seems a kind of magic, a mysterious circle I’m being drawn into. Louise’s voice is high and clear, and impossibly sweet. Leaning against her, I close my eyes and feel the vibration from her voice in my own chest.

When I sit up again, Kurt Wyant is craning his head around in the pew in front of us, baring his teeth at me,
ff-ff-ff.
The people are making a line up the center aisle, walking to the raised platform up front. Once there, they kneel and sip from the cup made of gold. The Chisolms make their way to the altar. The Wyant boys waddle out with their mother. But when I try to follow Louise, she stays me with her hand.

“Yah cyaant take communion,” she whispers. “Stay right here.”

My face goes hot, my mind is racing with confusion. I can’t drink from the cup of gold. I can’t drink from the cup, but the Wyant boys can. The Chisolms can. Louise can. When she returns I latch onto her arm.

Louise is guiding me out of the church. At the door, the minister stands in his white robe, shaking hands and nodding. He holds a Bible just like Louise’s. When the service ended, I saw Mrs. Chisolm scurry out the far end of her pew. Now she is standing just inside the red doors. I can see her smiling and laughing with people as they leave, but she breaks off several times to look toward Louise and me. When we arrive at the doorway, Mrs. Chisolm cuts through the line to the minister’s side.

“Here, here,” Mrs. Chisolm says, breathy as if she’s been jogging. Her face is orangey, wrinkled, like a rotting peach. She touches the minister’s elbow.

“Reverend Malone, I want you to meet Louise, who I told you all about. She’s the new maid, um, help, living up at the Abrahams’. Louise, this is the Reverend Harold Malone.”

Several people already outside in the sunshine turn around to watch us. Mrs. Chisolm’s lipstick has worked its way into red veins running outward from her lips. While Reverend Malone shakes hands with Louise, Mrs. Chisolm takes a cigarette out of her shiny purse and lights it, blowing the smoke out the door.

“Welcome to our parish,” says the minister, his cool blue eyes dancing in his platter face. “Delightful to have you. Delightful.”

Louise offers him a tiny close-lipped smile, saying nothing.

“I hope our service didn’t disappoint you,” the minister continues, still holding Louise’s hand, “that it compares acceptably with your church back home?”

Louise is looking down shyly, away from the minister’s gaze and speaks just above a whisper.

“Yes, thank you.”

“And this is the Abrahams’ girl, Addy,” Mrs. Chisolm says, grabbing at Reverend Malone’s elbow and pointing at me. “Amy cared for her some. I don’t know as they’ve ever been in here.
Such
busy people. Isn’t that right?
She’s
from New York.”

The minister bends down.

“Well, nice to meet you, Addy. Welcome to Coldbrook Episcopal. Hope to see more of you.”

His breath smells like sour milk, and I step back into the legs of a man behind me. Louise has moved down into the churchyard. I lurch forward and begin to run out after her when I feel a burning, like the twist of a rope, on my upper arm. Mrs. Chisolm has her hand around me and is pulling me in to her side. Her nails dig hard into my flesh.

“You ought to tell your mother to give that poor colored lady a break,” Mrs. Chisolm whispers in my ear, her breath hot and cigaretty. A slash of red stains Mrs. Chisolm’s front teeth. I try to get away.

“Having to bring you along on a Sunday.
Shame
on them.”

When my mouth meets Mrs. Chisolm’s skin, she lets loose a shriek that bounces against the high ceiling of the church foyer and out the front doors. Louise is back up the stairs in an instant, but not before I’ve left a perfect imprint of my teeth on the fat of Mrs. Chisolm’s upper arm.

Louise will not speak to me on the way home. Alone in the back of the car, I want to say I’m sorry. I roll the word, heavy as a stone, around on my tongue, where the tastes of blood and talcum powder linger. Instead I keep my lips closed, and
sorry
lands with a silent splash where it always does, in a dark place beneath my heart.

9

I
REENTERED THE ALFREDS’
house that evening just in time to hear my name being spoken somewhere within.

“Addy, not Annie. Adelaide, Papa. But dey call she Addy.”

Marva was in the living room, tucking a blanket around an old man’s legs and shouting to be heard by him. The soles of my wet sandals squeaked against the wood floor.

“Here, Papa.”

She guided me in front of her father’s cloudy eyes.

“Do I know her?” he asked, his head and neck bobbing about in the collar of his shirt like a turtle’s. Marva propped and adjusted him with swift efficiency.

“She’s de girl Lulu cared for in de States. ’Member when Lulu went in de States?”

Mr. Alfred shook his head dismissively and looked toward the side of his chair, as if searching for something else to engage him. With no teeth to support his mouth, his lower jaw folded up like a brown paper bag.

“Don’t know no Lulu.”

Marva looked at me and rolled her eyes.

“Well, yes yah do, Papa. Lulu was yah youngest. Louise. Derek’s mother. And she jes’ pass away, jes’ now. Addy’s come fi go to de funeral.”

His head continued to shake — up, down, sideways. Parkinson’s, I guessed. I began to get a fairer idea of Marva’s life, day-to-day.

“Don’t know no Lulu,” Mr. Alfred repeated.

“He gets some better dan dis,” Marva said, moving off toward the kitchen. “Him at his worst when he first wakes up from his nap.”

Mr. Alfred turned his head back in my direction.

“Thank you for stopping by,” he said in a deliberate, practiced way. He sounded like a Berlitz student. “It’s very nice to be seeing you again.”

I took a seat on the edge of the sofa and thanked him for having me, finding that soon I was bobbing my own body, emphasizing my appreciation with a sympathetic sort of mimicry. I made myself stop, but soon, hopelessly, began again. Mr. Alfred’s eyes were set on a place over my head. When I was quiet, he moved to fill the gap, pulling lines from some amnesiac’s phrase book.

“Where are you living now?”

“I live in New York City,” I shouted. “It was eighteen degrees when I left this morning.”

Mr. Alfred nodded vacantly. “New York City. Yes.”

“It’s lovely here. You have a great spot on this hill.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Lovely. Lovely. Now tell me, where are you living now?”

As I answered him again, he brought a withered hand up to his mouth and froze suddenly with a look of quiet alarm.

“Can I get you something?” I asked.

His hand stayed in front of his face. Marva halted at the threshold of the room, holding a cold drink.

“What is it, Papa? Yah teeth? Yah want yah teeth?”

Mr. Alfred studied his lap while Marva put down the drink and went toward his bedroom. I studied the bald nails in the floor-boards and found, emerging out of my anxiety, a freshly buried memory of my own father. Our most recent meeting. The images shuttled by, rickety like old movie frames, then faded out. My head felt light, spinny.

“Sorry, Papa,” said Marva, returning with a glass full of plastic teeth, magnified in water. She was laughing. “I know yah hate to entertain witout yah teeth.”

Marva slipped the dentures between her father’s lips and wiped at the corners of his mouth with a dishcloth. While he shuffled the teeth around in his face, she turned on a lamp above the old man’s head, suffusing the room with a yellow glow. Mr. Alfred looked in my direction and, seeing me fully for the first time, knit together his eyebrows. The light had done nothing to dispel the darkness in my eyes, which I’m sure Mr. Alfred could not help but see.

“Why is she here?” he asked, looking up at Marva.

“I told yah, Papa.” She threw her dishcloth over her shoulder. “She come fi de funeral.”

“I didn’ do anyting,” he said.

Marva handed him the glass of tea, and he held it between his shaky hands but didn’t drink. He looked at me again and his eyes welled with tears.

“I didn’ take ’em,” the old man moaned.

“Arright, Papa. Let’s not get inna foolishness. Addy’s been telling me she fixes up old paintings. Makes dem new again. How about dat?”

Mr. Alfred’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down beneath the papery skin of his throat.

“It weren’ me. I cyaant even reach de tree,” he said, his drink tipping precariously in his hands. “It’s Roly Bennett steals de limes, Mumma. It’s Roly. It ain’t me.”

Marva rescued the drink just as it began to spill on Mr. Alfred’s lap. He continued on, his weeping eyes now fixed on his daughter’s, imploring.

“Don’t mek me go wit her; don’ wanna go to de big house. Please, Mumma. It weren’ me!”

As the old man’s voice grew louder and began to trill like that of a captured bird, Derek entered swiftly from the direction of the kitchen and walked straight to his grandfather’s chair.

“What’s all dis about now, Pappy,” he whispered, squatting and stroking his grandfather’s head. Mr. Alfred’s hand came up, fluttering.

“Tell Miz Buxton I didn’ do it! I didn’! I DIDN’!”

I motioned to Marva that I was going to step out. Derek kept his eyes locked on his grandfather, continuing to caress him.

“It’s yah grandson Derek, Pappy. It’s Derek. Don’t yah worry about Mrs. Buxton. She won’t harm yah.”

Slipping away, I moved into the dark of the hallway and stood motionless while Mr. Alfred continued to shout. I could see through the front door the day’s last light playing on the trunk of a poinciana tree and for a few minutes indulged in a fantasy of walking out and leaving the Alfreds’ house for good.

Follow the road back south until you get to a phone, then call a taxi, I thought. Or maybe find a bus stop and chance the kindness of local people to guide you back over the mountains to the other side of the island. I saw myself dropping my bags in a clean little hotel room out near the airport. I could take a night walk along the beach, circumnavigating the sunburned couples and their tropical drinks lighting up the poolside bar. When the Alfreds discovered me gone, their surprise and disgust would be quickly overshadowed by their own more profound concerns. In a day’s time I’d be back at work and my visit to St. Clair no more than a big, but brief, mistake. Just do it, I was thinking. Cut your losses.

And then, as if from a dream, laughing, came Lou.
Gwan now, Addy, and don’t yah be a Frighten’ Friday.
It’s not that I thought she called to me from the dead, a ghostly apparition. Nothing so daft as that. It was something closer to me.
Upon
me, in fact, like her fingerprint might have been, long unseen but alive again under the ultraviolet light of the crazy day. There was no mistaking the fact that I could hear Lou again, when for so many years she’d been utterly lost to me. I could not but obey her.

Mr. Alfred was quieter now, his monologue mingling with the alarm of a confused rooster, somewhere sounding a continuous reveille.

“What is what is —” he said as Marva and Derek hushed and clucked. “How old I am I is old I what —”

Not wanting to hear any more of him, I moved off down the little hall and turned into an open doorway. There I discovered Cyril sitting on a dingy red carpet in the middle of a cramped room, his head tipped back beneath a bag of potato chips. Watching him from her seat on one of two single beds was a thin woman with a huge belly. She stood up gracefully despite her size and stepped lightly around the boy. Even under the unflattering glare of the overhead bulb she was ridiculously beautiful, her caramel skin set off by eyes of almost cornflower blue. I touched at my bedraggled hair, half expecting it to have fled with the rest of my dignity.

“Hello, I’m Floria,” she said, her tone polite and perfect in a way I’d never heard anywhere but the Caribbean. Miss St. Clair, I thought. Or pretty close to it.

“Pardon me,” I said, though I’m certain she did not catch the gravity of my meaning. Something about Floria, her eyes or that she was a woman close in age to me, moved me dangerously close to some sort of surrender.

She pressed her palm into mine.

“Not at all. I was just going.”

For the first time since I could remember, I thought I might cry. And though I’m sure Floria would have comforted me, I didn’t particularly want to break down, especially in front of the boy. Before anything too humiliating could happen, Floria turned back to Cyril.

“You’re not going to have any room for dinner,” she said, removing the bag from her nephew’s face. “Go on and wash up.”

Cyril wiped his hands on his T-shirt and picked up his truck. Looking back from the doorway, he stuck his tongue out at me and disappeared. Floria gestured toward the bed upon which my suitcase had been placed.

“There are towels for you in the bathroom,” she said, heading after the boy. “Dinner will be in half an hour, I expect.” Quietly shutting the door, she left me alone.