The Young in One Another's Arms Page 9

  “They’ve decorated a tree,” Ruth said. “They want Christmas.”

  “That would be Tom,” Clara said. “I was too tired, Ruth. I just couldn’t.”

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After Ruth had bought books and bottles for Tom and Gladys and Mavis, she struck upon an even better idea for them for Christmas. If they were going to set up house, she could give them nearly everything they needed from her own. It would be an easy way of disposing of all the things she wouldn’t any longer need. If they objected to the loss of a few dollars she might get from a sale, she’d turn their commune argument against them. The plan pleased Ruth, seemed to ease the weight of the shopping bag she carried over her shoulder as she walked back along her own Christmas-card street, mountain-ash berries capped with snow.

  As Ruth turned up her walk, cheerful, nearly excited, as if Christmas might again be a celebration for the living, she saw that someone was waiting on the front porch: a young black man, short, slight in build, wearing an absurd knitted cap which grew from his head into a huge scarf he had wrapped around his neck and chest.

  “Hello, lady,” he said, coming down the steps to her and reaching a hand to take the shopping bag. “You her all right,” he confirmed with a sharp look. “They told me in the beer parlor there’s this lady with one arm who looks like Abraham Lincoln, and she helps anybody, even niggers, and I say, where is she at? And here she is.”

  “Isn’t anyone else at home?” Ruth asked, smiling at him.

  “I couldn’t exactly say. I rang the bell, and I knocked hard, and then the door opened all by itself, but, since nobody did say come in, I stayed out here.”

  “Well, come in now,” Ruth said. “We don’t lock the door.”

  “You a little bit crazy, or is Vancouver really the Promised Land? Lady, in Detroit, you wouldn’t have no stove, no mattress, no furnace left here if you was just walking the dog around the block.”

  “In another couple of months, I won’t even have a house; so I don’t worry about it. What are you looking for, a place to stay?”

  “That’s right, and a way to work for it because I just ran fresh out of bread this morning.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Boy.”

  “No mother of yours ever named you that, come on,” Ruth said.

  “She named me Boyd, which is either a feathered creature who can fly—and I don’t fly—or the past tense of Boy—and I, thanks be to sweet Jesus, ain’t past tense yet. This way, everybody knows my name. I don’t even usually have to tell them, lady.”

  “Boy,” Ruth said, shaking her head. “My name isn’t lady. It’s Ruth. Put that heavy thing down, just on the dining-room table if you like.”

  “It is heavy. Didn’t you know Santa Claus had joined a union and won’t carry nothing over thirty pounds?”

  His bright patter had a nervous underedge, probably not just for this occasion, a tic turned into a talent.

  “You can stay here for a month anyway,” Ruth said. “But there’s just been a successful coup in this house. I’m still the head of state but without much domestic authority. We’re a kind of commune or family, depending on whose jargon you’re using.”

  “You mean, everybody’s got to vote?” Boy asked dubiously.

  “No, nothing as clear-cut as that. Anyway, there’s plenty you can do to earn your bed and board, no problem about that. I was just thinking I’d like to wrap most of the house up in Christmas paper and put it under the tree, and three hands would be better than one for that project.”

  “You are crazy, lady.”

  “Ruth.”

  “It’s a sad name,” he objected.

  “Yours is ridiculous, but, if I’m willing to call you Boy, you can manage to call me Ruth.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said and then added, “Ruth.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Wonder,” he said, “and that’s the truth.”

  “It is not,” Ruth said.

  “The safer I feel, the sillier I get.”

  She showed him Stew’s room, which she hadn’t tried to rent since Stew’s departure.

  “This here is for a son of the family,” Boy said, “not for the likes of me. Don’t you have no bed down by the coal bin?”

  “We heat with natural gas,” Ruth answered, refusing to be uncomfortable about her decision not to give him Arthur’s room. If he wanted to parody himself, that was his business, but she wouldn’t cooperate.

  Downstairs there were voices in the front hall, the rise of Gladys’ laughter, a hushing from Mavis.

  “Come on and meet the others,” Ruth said, and he followed her down the stairs and into the front hall. “This is, so he claims, Boy Wonder, here for a month, Gladys, Mavis, Tom.”

  Tom stepped forward to shake hands.

  “Y’all look like regular Christians,” Boy said, nodding at the parcels they carried. “But Santa Claus has already been and gone and ate up the baby.”

  “Where you from, Boy?” Tom asked.

  “I come from walking to and fro upon the earth, making out a report on Job’s Daughters.”

  “We’re not going to call you Boy. That’s ridiculous!” Gladys protested.

  “Listen, if you don’t give me no shit about my consciousness, I won’t give you no shit about yours, all right?”

  Mavis chuckled. “You’ve got her number, but it won’t dial that way.”

  “I’m a shit specialist,” Gladys said, “and I’m not calling you Boy.”

  “My other nickname’s Nigger. Take your pick,” he answered agreeably.

  Boy had not yet taken off his ridiculous hat, and he stood there small, riding on the balls of his feet, insisting that he start out this way.

  “Boy will have to do, then,” Mavis decided. “It’s not really so difficult, given that hat.”

  “I knit this hat myself,” Boy claimed, stroking the scarf across his chest. “And I can make corn bread, and I can shine shoes. I’m a one-boy campaign for preserving our native crafts.”

  “You’ve got the worst jokes I’ve heard in a long time,” Gladys said.

  “Lady, when you cook just for a joke, then you, too, will be truly free.”

  “Who is cooking tonight?” Ruth asked.

  “You and I are,” Tom said.

  In the kitchen they organized themselves without conversation, and Ruth found herself listening for Willard.

  “I have to remind myself he’s gone,” she said without needing to use his name.

  “How’s she?”

  “She fades in and out,” Ruth said. “Anyone would without distractions.”

  “We’ve found a house,” Tom said, “an old farmhouse down on the flats in horse country.”

  “How long would it take you to get to work?”

  “Too long,” Tom admitted, “but we all just liked it: fruit trees, room for a vegetable garden, berries. We can have it the first of February.”

  “I suppose Willard and I should move then, too. With Boy here to help, I should be able to close the place up in a month.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “West End? I don’t know.”

  “I don’t suppose Willard cares.”

  “The future looks after itself,” Ruth said, smiling.

  “Why is Willard your problem?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruth admitted. “I’ve never been able to answer that question about anyone … or anything, and somewhere back a while I stopped asking.”

  “People use you.”

  “Hal, you mean? I guess I use him, too. What is it Mavis says? ‘We’re social animals after all.’”

  Boy and Gladys brought their political sparring in to dinner, Mavis being occasional referee.

  “Sociological context is all-important, honey, if you and I are going to understand each other at all,” Boy was explaining cheerfully. “Now, I’m a sort of James Baldwin reactionary, born too late for my style, a faggoty
little nigger making up to white boys; so I got to come to a backward country like Canada where there’s enough social lag for me to survive. I mean, you want to be nice to me, don’t you? Tom here does, too. He wants to be my friend, and so this here is a tree I can swing in. They cut all that kind down by now in my native land, and that’s the truth. I mean, I’ve only been in Canada a week, and the guilt here is just unreal, and you hardly got no niggers to make up to.”

  “How did you get into the country?” Tom asked.

  “Underground railway,” Boy said. “I walked.”

  “Any papers?”

  “I got lots of papers: dishonorable discharge from the Younited States Army, certificate of inferior birth, negative Wassermann, and I pee purple like everyone else losing weight.”

  “Where’d you go to college?” Tom asked.

  “Berkeley,” Boy said. “This here’s a smart white boy, and he don’t come from around here.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I come from Iowa.”

  “That’s a good laggy place from what I hear,” and then Boy turned to Mavis. “You want to know, if I been to college, why I should still talk like a nigger, don’t you?”

  “You’re the first black man I’ve ever met,” Mavis admitted. “I don’t know what to expect.”

  “The Promised Land!”

  Ruth watched and listened, wondering if Boy could also keep quiet, but she was soon to discover that even by himself he sang and chattered. At breakfast, Gladdy shoved a large roll into his mouth and, leaving the house to do an errand with him, she wrapped his long scarf around his head like a gag. But his talking did not get in the way of his working. While he explained, “My mama, she say …” the kitchen shone with his industry, and every wood surface in the house could be used as a mirror.

  “I got a Lady Macbeth complex so big it could clean up this whole, old, sad world. Look at dat shine.”

  “He says anything that comes into his head,” Mavis said, shaking hers. “Next to him Gladdy seems like a deaf-mute.”

  “I had a friend like him in high school,” Tom said, “only he went into the Army and made a success of it. Too bad.”

  “A real friend?” Mavis asked.

  “Well, I thought so. How can you say, any more?”

  “Is he really … gay, or is that a joke, too?”

  “I don’t think anything he says is a joke,” Tom said.

  “I wonder what Joanie will make of him,” Ruth said, aware of Mavis’ uneasy curiosity.

  “And Willard,” Mavis added.

  “Willard won’t make anything of him at all,” Tom said.

  “Where did he and Gladdy go?”

  “To get the damned turkey,” Ruth said.

  Tom laughed. “Still not resigned to Christmas, are you?”

  Ruth left them all to the ritual chores, made elaborate by Gladys’ imagination, confused by Boy’s inventions, and went to see Clara, but she had drifted too far off for Ruth to call her into the new interest of Boy or the Christmas preparations, and Ruth could not afford to join her again out there in the loss of the past. She stayed only an hour and then hurried home, ignoring the number of derelict houses on her street, glad of the tree in her own window bright with welcome.

  The four were all sitting on the floor in front of the fire, bowls on their laps, shredding bread for stuffing.

  “How is she?” Mavis asked, and to Ruth’s shrug, “We’ll all go tomorrow, shall we?”

  “We’ll see,” Ruth said.

  She did not want to think about Clara. She did not want to think about anything outside this room at this moment, Gladys and Tom leaning comfortably against each other, back to back, Boy and Mavis facing each other with resolute goodwill, a place for Ruth on the couch where she could enjoy the tree, the light of the fire on Boy’s dark, pockmarked face, on Tom’s fairness. Later she would say, “And now we’re going to furnish the farmhouse.” Later she would let them know that they could be let go, were free, but just for this time she held them in her dark eyes, in her quiet heart, for herself.

  “What would old Scrooge think, looking in on this house tonight, Mavis?” Tom asked.

  Mavis smiled, but her eyes were thoughtful. “I’m just glad I don’t have to make his rounds tonight. There’s not all that much love and forbearance around these days.”

  “That’s cheerless of you, Mavis,” Gladys said.

  “You know I’m a reactionary. I’d even be a Christian if I could manage it and live in a Christian world where twice a year there could be at least a little kindly and generous hypocrisy.”

  “If you would consent to go to midnight mass with me,” Boy said in a mock-formal tone, “I think we could still find some saints to try the patience of. And I could say a prayer for Martin Luther King, whose genu-ine love and charity was a matter of FBI record, and for my mama, who loved him, too.”

  “Are you serious?” Mavis asked.

  “He can’t be,” Gladys said.

  “I am. I am. Why don’t we all go?”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead …” Gladys said.

  “No.” Tom shook his head.

  “What about you, Ruth?” Boy asked.

  “Churches make me sad,” Ruth said, “but you and Mavis go if you feel like it.”

  “You don’t have to be scared if you go with me,” Boy said to Mavis. “If there’s a bolt of lightning, it’s bound to strike me, for I have lusted after Jesus Christ with a loving heart for lo these many years.”

  “You’re outrageous,” Gladys said. “You aren’t going to go, are you, Mavis?”

  “Yes, I think I am.”

  Ruth watched Gladys swallow a standard speech on the evils of the Church. She was comfortable enough gagging Boy or calling him names, but she had lost the ground under her feet too many times in the last couple of days to try arguing seriously with him. Mavis, on the other hand, didn’t want to argue. She was fascinated by the contradictions he offered, fearful, perhaps in some part hopeful that the parody might be, as Boy put it, “the truth.” He was off again, weaving scripture and ghetto rhythms and his own nonsense into a Christmas sermon.

  “So when the lion lies down with the lamb, he’s going to be wearing my little red shoes on his ears, and that I gotta see.”

  “Before you go,” Ruth said, “there’s a Christmas chore to be done. We have to furnish the farmhouse. I was going to get Boy to help me wrap everything up, but, since we still need it for a month, that didn’t seem practical; so I’ve got some little red stickers instead. We’re going to go round the house and mark everything you can use.”

  Against the protests she had expected, Ruth was firm. Tom gave in first, the most comfortable of them in her affection and therefore the quickest to see how much pleasure the idea gave her, how much relief from the grief of finally closing up the house. Once he had changed sides, Gladys and Mavis could not hold out long.

  “If you’re really sure, Ruth …”

  “I can’t keep more than I can get into a two-bedroom apartment. I’m never going to run a boardinghouse again. There’s nothing really valuable, but it would be useful to you. The dining-room table, for instance.”

  “Oh, not the dining-room table!” Gladys protested.

  “What would I do with it?” Ruth asked. “And it was given to me in the first place.”

  Having convinced them they could accept so large a gift, Ruth had less difficulty persuading them to claim their own beds, chests of drawers, Boy helping her with clownish descriptions of her priceless antiques. By the time he and Mavis went off to church, Gladys and Tom were settled at the dining-room table with Ruth to make a list of what they could use from the kitchen.

  “What a Christmas!” Gladys said. “We’ll never have to get married, Tom.”

  “Not even after our fifth child is born?” he asked.

  “Ruth, aren’t we wildly overdoing this?” Gladys asked. “You could get real money for these things.”

  “You can’t put a price on being able
to turn a burden into a pleasure,” Ruth said.

  “It seems a shame you didn’t have kids of your own,” Gladys said.

  Ruth looked at her and realized that Gladys didn’t even know, the conspiracy of silence Ruth and Clara had kept so successful that no one any longer knew not just about her death but about her life. The silence of grief had become a void, and that seemed to Ruth a monstrous betrayal. But how could they not know that she had lost her child when it had so much more obviously crippled her than the loss of her arm?

  “I did have a daughter,” she found herself saying. “She was killed in a car accident just a little over two years ago.”

  Gladys reached over and took Ruth’s hand. “What was her name?”

  “Claire,” Ruth said and found that that long unspoken name made her smile instead of weep. “I wanted to call her Clara, but Clara said she had to have a name of her own.”

  “How old was she?” Gladys asked.

  “Twenty-two—your age. Keeping on with the house, keeping it filled with young people was something I thought would help Clara … and me, and it has. And now that it’s time to give it up, you help with that, too.”

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Tom asked.

  “I told you, Tom, if you’d been my own children, you would have cleared out years ago …”

  “But we’re not,” Tom said. “Why are we less important than Willard?”

  “Willard can’t leave home, and he’s been with me for fourteen years.”

  “It’s not as if we’re all going to opposite ends of the earth,” Gladys said. “Give Ruth and Willard six months in a high rise and us out in the boondocks, and we may all be back together again in a house two blocks from here.”

  “Then be sure to take enough furniture,” Ruth said. “And put the roaster on that kitchen list. Wherever I am, this is absolutely my last turkey.”

  “Do you have a picture of Claire?” Gladys asked.

  “Lots of them, in a trunk up in the attic, which I’ll have to unearth sometime soon. She looked like her father, the same shape of head, the same lopsided grin.”