I could see my stricken smile on Mom’s face and I knew that Dad, in the kitchen mixing drinks, was wearing the same expression of being totally bugged out by our guests. My raisinette eyes were huge with the effort not to stare at dark oblongs the size of leeches on Clark’s neck and hands.
Dad returned with a tray. Mrs. Williams was disappointed. She hadn’t expected iced tea.
“How long have you been diagnosed?” I heard Mom ask, awkwardly, for her, who ordinarily dived in with no compunction, needing to get somebody’s story in the first twenty minutes of acquaintance.
“What do you mean?”
Silver bangles nearly slipped from his bony hands. He strung together popular tunes, the sort of music Mom had nothing to do with. His last job had been on a cruise ship out of Florida.
The pitcher of iced tea was for Mom. Dad decided we could all have some. Mrs. Williams said that that was a new one on her, iced tea in Chicago in February. I thought Dad wanted to tell the smiling skull that we had no room-temperature water. Mom hadn’t been able to say thank you when Clark finished playing. He went back to his seat. We smiled some more. Dad came back with a jelly glass of water.
Dad and Mom had inherited many chairs and tables, but nothing about the conglomeration was designed. Our house was storage space, a pack-rat outpost. One side of the hallway, between the living room and the kitchen, was lined with ribcage-high shelves of oversize illustrated books about black American history, Africa, television, the stockyards, and baseball, along with an encyclopedia from the year Solomon was born and a set from the year I was born. On the other side of the hallway were seven unmatched side chairs. We were the lobby of a bygone rooming house or the waiting room of some settlement charity.
“It’s so interesting here,” Clark cooed. My eyes had been following his.
Mom used a stepladder to dust the iconostasis of reproductions that my paternal grandmother had liked to razor from books and then frame. She vandalized volume after volume in that fashion. We had her small paintings of waterfalls and atolls in lots of places, as well as framed posters from Black Expos over the years. The plants were plastic.
Mom’s acoustic floor tiles were more than twenty years old. Three of the same kind of standing lamps grouped beside her piano, the mahogany companion that broke her young solitude. It had been her mother’s purchase. My grandfather’s creditors carted off everything, I’d always heard, but Champ would have murdered anyone who tried to take the Steinway. I like to think she knew how much Mom loved it.
“Have you read all these books?” Clark asked Dad.
“Now, your buddy Ralston there was a reading fool,” Mrs. Williams began. “I don’t care for this,” she said, replacing the glass of iced tea on its coaster. “All that reading you all were trying to make people do stuffed up his head. His rag head burned clean through. I wish we could put something in this.” She shivered.
“We tried to shoot that chicken before the egg boiled, I’ll not argue with you there,” Dad said. He wouldn’t look at the glass she raised and peered into and put back down. He knew how to wait people out.
I ran to call them a taxi. It took forever to come. Mom did have an old Christmas present she’d not delivered to Mrs. Williams, a plastic container of decorative soaps. She could send her off with something. Mom took Clark’s right hand, lesions and all, into both of hers and said that the gift of music meant that we would never lose hope completely.
“I can dig that.”
Dad clapped Mrs. Williams’s shoulders after he helped her on with her coat. He handed Clark his gear item by item and slapped him heartily on the back. It was a test. I shook hands. But we didn’t come down the steps with Mrs. Williams. They picked their way, though there was no ice or snow. I’d read plenty of articles, but I washed my hands anyway. I saw the jelly glass in the kitchen trash. That freed me to take Windex to Mom’s piano keys.
When I was first back, Mom was going to let me talk, when I was ready, about the friend in Berlin I’d moved in with. But after Mrs. Willliams’s visit, she wrung her hands, tormented that that wasting away and denial could be my future. They’d seen a TV movie the summer before about a son coming home to tell his family he has AIDS.
I looked down at lamb chops. We were eating later than usual. Mom had called Solomon. She was in that kind of mood, Dad’s pleading eyes said.
“These are pancake days,” I said.
Dad filled the sink and Mom pushed him aside and plunged her face into the ice and water.
* * *
I was little. I heard Mom telling Dad about it. He had not gone with her to the airport to welcome home Uncle Ralston and Ralston Jr., Dad’s sedated and unsteady best friend. Dad said he’d gone to the United Center and followed what Chicago’s new team had accomplished in the Western Division just so he could have something to say to him.
The trip back from Africa had done more than just exhaust Uncle Ralston. Rest was not the answer, from the look of him, Mom was saying. There was that tone in her voice that I would come to know well, a tone that said how deeply engaged in the problem of this human being she was — not in this human being’s problems, but in the problem that this individual’s life represented, what this particular life meant. In this instance, the long trip back from Africa in the company of his mad son had taken something out of Uncle Ralston that would never be put back.
Mom meant something different from the utter fatigue she and Dad experienced after getting back from our turn at the lake cabin nobody loved or the forgiveness she meted out after that last attempt to take the five of us children somewhere cultural. As with everything I overheard as a child, I didn’t understand until much later what I had managed not to forget of what came my way. I never thought of Uncle Ralston as walking around with a hole, but then one day he’d come down to the editorial room to see if anybody was there, and finding only me — which was the same in his view as no one being there — he’d gone back up to his office. The sun went right through him and hit the floor. I remembered what Mom had said about the part of him that would never be put back.
To have met Mrs. Williams’s grandson rekindled in me that panic I was ashamed of. But I was crawling all over myself. I decided to fish in the virus-free Mattachine generation. I took an action, as they say in AA. I could tell that the grizzly guy in the meeting at the Episcopal church liked me. Twenty years my senior, he saved a seat for me. I let him get me water, too. I wasn’t interested in what he said in the meetings, but he’d been stationed at an ordnance ammunitions depot near Bamberg in the early 1960s and had spent some time around the university in Erlangen.
“Segregation was a way of life. Something we expected,” he said over his black coffee. “Major Schuler was fairly decent,” he continued after a while in his blown-fuse drawl. “Fräuleins who only associated with whites avoided you.” I had asked him what Germany had been like for him. He stopped talking again. The ease of the silences was a pleasant surprise.
Another surprise about this older man was that he lived so far out. I found a pay phone. Dad didn’t know what to say. “A friend from the meeting…” They’d heard so many of my concoctions. They couldn’t help it, the only place they trusted me to be safe was under their roof, in front of their eyes. In the beginning, they took my interest in Berlin as an extension of a school project — and Cello was there. But then they appeared to understand when I spoke about the need to start over. I didn’t talk about it as getting away. I suppose I didn’t want to know what they really thought of it.
He breathed heavily into his collar as he drove. He took me to a short-stay motel out in Aurora. You can’t offer anyone anything, so you get to it. He hadn’t had it in a while either. His sperm was very warm, as if his scrotum had a thermostat. He’d been sober eight years, he said again, and was separated from his wife, not divorced. I wouldn’t let him drive me home. I took the West-Northwest back downtown. I wouldn’t give him Mom and Dad’s number.