Cleo rose, with a little nod at Judy, who came as obediently as a puppy trained to heel. There was a ring of chocolate around her mouth that made her look comical, and a smudge of it on one of her gloves. Cleo sighed a little. Children made a mess with chocolate candy. Any fool ought to know that. What did this old man think lollipops were invented for?
“About the rent, Mr. Van Ryper,” she said, wiping Judy’s mouth with the cotton handkerchief and taking this opportunity to glare in her eye, “thirty dollars would suit me better. And you wouldn’t have to wait for it. You’d have it every month on the dot. My husband told me to tell you that.”
Mr. Van Ryper gestured toward the dining-room doors. His voice was patient and instructive. “Madam, each one of those doors cost two hundred dollars. The staircase cost a small fortune. There is a marble bowl in the master bedroom. The bathtub is porcelain, and so is the — ah — box. But if thirty dollars is all you can afford, I hope you will make up the difference in appreciation.”
“Indeed I will,” Cleo promised fervently. “It’s been my dream to live in Brookline.”
“This isn’t Brookline,” Mr. Van Ryper said crossly. “The other side of the street is Brookline. This side is Roxbury, which that thundering herd of Irish immigrants have overrun. They have finally pushed their boundary to here. Time was when Roxbury was the meeting place of great men. Now its fine houses are being cut up into flats for insurrectionists. I’m moving to Brookline within a few days. Brookline is the last stronghold of my generation.”
Cleo swallowed her disappointment. Several colored families were already living in Roxbury. They didn’t talk about the Irish the way Mr. Van Ryper did. They called them nice white people. They said they lived next door to such nice white people, and made you feel out of fashion because your neighbors were colored.
She opened her purse, taking great care that its contents were not wholly revealed to Mr. Van Ryper.
“Just one other thing first,” he said. “Your reference. That is to say, your husband’s employer.”
“My husband’s in business,” Cleo explained. “He has a wholesale place in the Market. All kinds of fruit, but mostly bananas.”
Mr. Van Ryper’s eyes filled with interest. “Bart Judson? The Black Banana King? Never met him, but I hear he’s pretty amazing. Well, well. I’m happy to rent my house to him. I like to do business with a businessman. Tell you what. We’ll settle on a rental of twenty-five dollars. Ah, that pleases you, doesn’t it? But there’s a condition to it. I’d want your husband to take care of minor repairs. You see, I’m a tired old man, quite unused to being a landlord. I’d hate to be called out of bed in the middle of the night to see about a frozen water pipe.”
The matter was settled at once and Cleo handed over the money. Mr. Van Ryper found a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil in his pockets, and paused in the writing of the receipt to make an inquiry. Did Mrs. Judson want it in ink? Cleo answered hastily and heartily that pencil was fine.
WHEN THE DOOR CLOSED BEHIND HER, Cleo drew a long contented breath. Then she walked briskly to the trolley stop, with Judy bobbing alongside again.
“Are we going home now?” asked Judy, who had been hurried through a scant breakfast and was hopeful of an early lunch.
“We’re going to your father’s store,” said Cleo abstractedly. “Now don’t ask any more questions. Try saying your table of twos. Bet you can’t finish before the trolley comes.”
Judy opened her mouth with alacrity, because it was rare that her mother took time to admire her accomplishments. But Cleo said briskly, “Try saying them silently. I’m thinking.”
Her mind was revolving around her sisters, plotting the most direct route between the two points of wish and fulfillment. All of her sisters were as blind as bats when it came to their husbands. They loved them. What could they find in them to love? Not a man among them was a decent provider. Serena and Charity worked in service whenever times were harder than usual. Lily would have gone to work, too, if she could have taken her child on her job as her sisters did in the South.
What kind of way was that for her sisters to live, from hand to mouth, from payday to payday, from what she could scrape up to send them? Yet they still believed they belonged to their husbands, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health. If they demanded no more of life than a man in the house, it was time someone else demanded more for their children.
Serena and Charity were still down home. But Lily had left the South when Pa in his lonesomeness married Miss Hattie. Lily was scared of mild Miss Hattie, who had never raised her voice in her life. But Lily was scared of everything, including her shadow. When she was little, she had to be put to bed before the lamps were lighted. If she saw her shadow, she screamed like a banshee, and ran like something was after her.
The old folks said Mama had birthmarked Lily the time old Spot went mad in the yard and came near chewing a hunk out of three-year-old Cleo, who had been teasing the poor old dog to play all the long hot day. Mama had never held a gun in her life. But she ran and grabbed Pa’s hunting piece and aimed true, though she was shaking with fright. She was white as death when she fired. Her color didn’t dreen back for two days, and Lily was born before it did. Lily came into the world so white she wouldn’t have browned in an oven, and she was always the scariest thing on two feet. The old folks said she was marked.
Cleo’s letters home, after Pa’s second marriage, didn’t include one kind word about Miss Hattie. She couldn’t bear the thought of the woman who had taken Mama’s place, and she tried to turn her sisters against her. She succeeded in turning Lily, who had always believed anything Cleo told her. Lily let herself believe that Miss Hattie didn’t want Mama’s children anywhere near her, reminding her, whenever she looked at them, of Pa’s greater love for another woman. She grew so nervous around Miss Hattie that Pa decided to send her up North to her married sister.
She got as far as New York. But she might as well be at the North Pole. For Cleo had never been able to visit her. She had talked too freely to Mr. Judson about her fears for her timid sister in such a wicked city. He had acquired the same fears for her and refused to let her set foot in Sodom.
Lily had never been to Boston. When she got off the train in New York, she promised God she would never get on another one as long as she lived. It was weeks before she recovered from the animality of Jim Crow, and the additional horrors of sweating through hot waves of nausea, of swooshing through tunnels of terrible blackness, of riding high above swirling water, of fighting off sleep to watch her belongings, of feeling her eyes and her unrelaxed limbs ache with weariness each morning.
In Washington, Victor Bates, a Pullman porter, had taken her under his wing. All the way to New York he ran back and forth between his duties and her coach. She was eighteen, and her youth and helplessness made him accept her as his charge. She clung to the comfort and masculine strength his kind brown face and big broad frame personified to her grateful heart.
When they reached New York, she refused to be put on the Boston train. She said she would die if she rode another mile. In one of her rare seizures of stubbornness, when fear gave her the courage to hold fast, she stood firm as a rock in the middle of the station, with muttering people pushing past her.
Victor took her to a married friend’s house. He thought if she rested a day, she would feel differently in the morning. But after an evening in her company, with her liquid eyes never leaving his face, he knew he did not want her to go to Boston either.
Victor Bates was no worse than the average second-rate husband, Cleo conceded. But he was a road man. Lily spent half of her nights alone, with only a sleeping child to look to for protection. Victoria was going on seven. It wasn’t doing her any good to have a jack rabbit for a mother. She and Lily would be better off in Boston, where Cleo could look after them both, than in New York with one little man who spent most of his time bowing and scraping to white folks.
Yet