Mom’s father’s children by his first wife blamed his decline into drink on her mother. They would never have anything to do with my mother. They went out of their way to be rude to her at his grave. The minister asked the widows to compose themselves in the presence of death. Mom’s mother, Lucille, bridge player and comrade to white leftists, wore white gloves, yet she was the brawling kind. There was no estate to fight over. Reginald’s bankruptcy hadn’t even been a drama. It was just a legal declaration of what had been so for a long time.
Lucille — Champ, her friends called her — rotund, puffing, carried the odd survival supply in her purse, like a flashlight or a thermal blanket that could fold down into the size of a deck of cards. “What I have to have is a heel. I never leave the house under five feet six.” Her wig looked like a helmet of steel wool, something that could cut. Mom seldom saw her; we never experienced her as a grandmother. I was fat, but Champ couldn’t keep her eyes off my brother. Some Laboratory High School girls stopped bickering over Solomon when our grandmother showed them the.22 she’d brought along to his graduation.
She started ringing doorbells in her huge building at upsetting hours, showing neighbors her.22 and letting them know she had their backs. When Mom decided that her mother couldn’t live alone anymore, she had to drug her to trick her into the nursing home. Mom asked Dad to remove the illegal handguns under the kitchen sink and in Champ’s night table. Solomon said her place smelled like a human barnyard. There were dead mice in the oven. She had gone downhill right along with the famed Rosenwald Apartments where Mom grew up.
Mom kept a picture of her mother outside the Grand Terrace Ballroom on VE Day. She believed in music in the schools. Mom said her mother had been proud of knowing the legendary teacher and violinist at the DuSable School, Captain Diet. Through him, Mom had had first-rate music teachers. Champ gave Mom that.
* * *
“I always thought ‘Negro’ very distinguished,” Dad said. Solomon got up from the table. “Negro Spiritual, Negro historian.”
“Ne-gro, Ne-gro,” Cello’s little brother Ronald and sister Rhonda chanted.
“‘I am a black woman the music of my song some sweet arpeggio of tears is written in a minor key,’” Mom recited.
“‘And I can be heard humming it in the middle of the night,’” Cello continued from nearby. She had been going to a hairdresser Mom disapproved of, someone who worked from a chair in her apartment bathroom. She’d styled Cello’s unbelievable hair into balls and loops tied up in heavy gold thread. She looked like she was wearing a queen bee’s egg sac.
It was perfectly okay to stare at Cello when she came back from her unauthorized hairdresser. Mom was hoping to pressure her into returning to the fold, the shop that was also a policy parlor, not far from the Eagle, where she’d been going for years. Otherwise, we were forbidden to manifest our giddy responses to Cello’s experiments with her looks. That would add to her self-consciousness about her new life as a beautiful young slimmed-down pianist who’d impressed a jury with her playing of the Appassionata. Cello’s new, maybe still shaky confidence showed up in how many of Mom’s rules and Dad’s maxims she didn’t want to follow or believe anymore.
“And I can be heard humming in the night,” Mom said.
“What?”
“The poem. Mari Evans. The line is, ‘And I can be heard humming in the night.’ And don’t say ‘what.’ Darling?”
Both Cello and Dad answered.
“And since when did you stop being my brown baby?” Dad said behind Mom’s chair. In those days, he went back to the Eagle after dinner.
I was enamored of Cello and spied on her a great deal when I was a boy and she a teenager. I knew absolutely that she used to crack the door to the basement and stick her hair in, even if I didn’t understand what it was that she was trying to catch the sound of.
* * *
Nobody could kick me out of Berlin, I told myself. I had not flunked out. No construction went on in the winter months, I told the ChiChi. Incredibly, Rosen-Montag was attending to two projects in Japan. I was just taking a break. I had to. Rosen-Montag’s wife informed me that I would no longer receive wads of West German marks every four weeks. Instead, I would be paid from chapter to chapter, invoice to invoice — meaning, irregularly. I never asked about the faces no longer around the Nissen huts. Anyone not involved in site construction or Rosen-Montag’s next projects was expendable, the canteen gossip said. My German had improved. Stray bits of information seeped into my understanding unbidden.
To celebrate my departure, Manfred himself prepared an onion tart. His blue-eyed oncologist brought a horrible, giant cookie of the season. I got to sleep, but a part of me must have been listening for it. She tried to keep it down when Manfred brought her to orgasm in the middle of the night. I could hear his balls slapping her ecstatic behind.
My campaign for an adult life was not over. I had merely withdrawn to winter quarters. Some mornings it was so cold in Chicago the pavement burned the soles of my feet even in my Doc Martens. Mom and Dad had so much stuff in the garage the car wouldn’t fit. I went out in the mornings to scrape the ice from Dad’s windshield. I wanted him to see how together I was, mundane things included. My Berlin books were in those boxes under Manfred’s front-room window, I liked telling myself. The rest were back with me, in my room in my father’s house, because I could no longer afford the storage bill across town.
I was working for the process server of a lawyer friend of Dad’s while revising chapters that Rosen-Montag’s wife had decided were not headed in the right direction. The editorial committee of Rosen-Montag’s foundation recommended that more emphasis be put on getting his points across through his illustrations. I was stunned to hear from such a body. My chapters were in danger of being reduced to captions unless I could come up with something.
Dad had an office at home, in his basement den, and another at the Cracker Jack plant, an accountancy side job, and his main one in the Eagle building and printing plant off Wabash, near Forty-Third, in its own dead-end pocket of parking lot. One of the former dairies in the neighborhood, the Eagle building was sometimes mistaken for a hamburger joint because of its bright Art Deco front of white purple-bordered tiles, with two-story towers at either end. Only the front of the plant was decorated. The rest stretched toward a far alley, a wide, flat one-story structure of industrial brown and unreconstructed factory windows.
The public walked into a bleak, dusty reception area. Behind the listless secretary, a wall shielded the open-floorplan mysteries of the editorial process. A thicker wall farther back did nothing to block noise from the presses in the rear. The staircase up to Uncle Ralston’s domain was crooked. Dad and Ralston Jr. were shut up in the tower opposite, their stairs precarious with boxes there was no room for elsewhere. Nobody was ever worried about inspections. From the men’s room between editorial and press you could see across empty lots to the orange of the tin-drum fires of a homeless encampment two blocks away. Arguments on the rear wooden fire escapes could be sudden and violent.
The whole neighborhood was a hazard, from the boarded-up buildings to the people fighting and sleeping with the trash on the green island of Garfield Boulevard. Dad’s office had stacks of papers and books and clippings, and boxes held rocks and minerals and philosopher’s stones and model airplane kits, the sophisticated kind, the kind you didn’t have to share with children, the expensive ones that really flew, operated by remote controls. His office was the perfect place for him to get away from Mom’s crazies, the sad cases that Mom was always trying to help.