The girl, woman now, with her hair shoved under a blue turban, cocked her head and said yes, she thought she remembered. “But I believe she’s passed on,” she said.
His knees went wobbly. A lightness filled his head and a pain pressed into his left temple. I shouldn’t have asked, he thought. He looked hard into her light brown eyes.
“There was somebody like that. . right here. I don’t recollect,” the woman said, flustered.
“Anybody around who’d know?”
“Miss Maylene. She helps out Miz Corona. And Miz Corona would know.”
He found Miss Maylene in the large first-floor bedroom converted to office use. It had another small room behind it that looked out on the garden. A tall woman in a yellow tulle dress, Maylene from Dalton, Tennessee, stood at the wide shiny desk, sliding wax paper in between layers of blue blouses. The room smelled of camphor. The woman waved her fingers, picked up a glass atomizer, and sprayed the air in front of her. Behind her, outside the window, somebody turned on a red light. The woman straightened herself and stood stiffly with one hand out in front of her as if holding off the atomizer spray, or feeling her way. She didn’t seem to know him, not at first.
“Yes,” she said, “I remember Cappie. She came back here several years ago. You work for the police, don’t you?”
“No mam, I never been associated with that outfit.”
She gave him a long birdlike look, cocking her narrow face to one side. Her wrists were spindly.
“Are you an army man?”
“Not anymore. They sent me home because of my leg.” He had scars on his legs — where he’d been lashed — if she wanted to check his story. “I’m Miss Cappie’s son — one of em.”
“Not the one that went to prison.”
“No, mam, I’m his older brother.”
“I see the resemblance. Well,” she said sitting down at the desk, “I am sorry about your mother. Sit down,” she said. Her arm like a relic. “That chair.”
He took the pink plush-bottomed reed chair in front of the desk and sank down until he could hardly see over it.
“That’s my mercy chair,” she said, smiling.
He propped himself on the edge. “I hadn’t seen her since I was a boy,” he said. After the first shock he felt calm.
“She was sick when she came here. A couple of people remembered her. It was just after the time that Miss Ellereen died. You remember her?”
“Yes’m, I do.”
“She got a wasting disease, cancer, or something, and we had to keep her in one of the little houses out back. She got it down in her testines and it was a little. . stinky, you might say.” She smiled in a funny way.
“Miss Ellereen?”
“You remember how big she was. Won’t nothing left of her when she died.” She smiled more brightly. “Then right after that your mother showed up. She arrived in a cab. She was wearing a leather dress, like a Indian squaw. What’s that called—”
“Buckskin?”
“Like she was a squaw. . or a cowboy woman — Annie Oakley or somebody. From out west.”
“I understand.”
“She was skinny as a bird. She had a flat white hat with little red cloth balls on a fringe around the edges. She was shaking so bad the little balls shook. I believe Miss Corona had just taken over, maybe it was that same week — I believe Miss Corona was afraid at first to let her in. But then a couple of the other women recognized her, or recognized her name. The girls, except for me and Miss Corona, were all too young to remember her. I believe Buster — the workman — he remembered her too. He was a friend I believe of your brother’s when he was living over here at Mr. Oliver’s — the funeral home?”
“Yes.”
“He was the one went up and gave her a hug. He reminded them of who she was — told them, I mean, like they was waiting for a explanation.”
“She was sick?”
“Sick? Did I say sick?” She glanced into her open palm as if the answer was written there. “She was run down and dog-tired. She didn’t say if there was anything else wrong with her. She just seemed real tired, wore out. They had to near carry her up the stairs. She made it all the way up to the third floor. They put her in one of the little rooms up there. She seemed stronger for a couple of days. She even came downstairs and sat out in the back over by the garden.”
Just then the door opened and a large tawny-skin woman, ample in all her parts, spilt here and there from her pale blue gown covered partially by a green satin wrapper, entered the room. Delvin got up. He recognized her too: Miz Corona. Miss Maylene introduced him and explained what they were doing. Miz Corona — broad-faced with flesh across the bridge of her nose and filling her cheeks, dark, sharp eyes, a thin mouth heavily rouged — studied him, passed over without seeming to recognize him, and spoke to Miss Maylene about a plumbing problem, overflow on the other side of the house.
“Your mother was a funny lady,” she said to Delvin. “Even there at the last she was making jokes.”
“Do you know what was wrong with her?”
“Weary, like so many. Worked to death. I spect the running didn’t help. She liked to sit in the garden. Right out in the middle of it among the squash and the butterbeans and such. Didn’t like the flowers much, just the old fuzzy yellow squash fruit and the little butterbeans and all. Said where she’d been living she couldn’t get vegetables like that to grow. She would lift the tomatoes — not pick em, just weigh them in her hand, put her face down among the squash leaves — dip way down, almost fall out of her chair.” She glanced at the door. “Then one day,” she said quickly, as if she was already passing like time itself to other things, “she couldn’t get out of bed. You remember that, May.”
“She was right upstairs.”
“That’s right. Tired on top of tired. The next morning when the girl went in to wake her she had passed over.”
Delvin felt a stillness in him, as if a little boat had stopped rocking.
“Who buried her?”
“We did,” Miss Maylene said. “Miz Corona had us pay for the funeral right out of the operating money. We keep a fund for the girls — emergencies. .”
“I mean, which funeral home?”
“Oh. Mr. Oliver’s.” Maylene patted her own wrist. “He’s on his way out, too, I hear.”
“Notice is taken, May,” said Miz Corona.
Delvin experienced a small sadness propped on another, greater, sadness. He was sweating, just slightly, and felt a little cold at the same time. There were pictures on the wall, mountainscapes, tall gray peaks with tiny people standing around at the bottom. He had a feeling that everything was about to bust loose. He wanted to lie down somewhere.
“Could I see the room where my mother died?”
The two women glanced at each other and he saw the look of exasperation pass over Miz Corona’s face.
“You can if you want to,” Miss Maylene said. She called out the name Desiree.
Miz Corona stuck her hand out, palm down — did she want him to kiss it? — and Delvin took it, shook the bulging flesh carefully as he thanked her for her help.
A door on the side opened and the Ghost, wearing khaki army pants and a pink shirt, came in. “Desiree’s busy,” he said. He stared straight at Delvin and Delvin could see surprise hit his face like a shot. His eyes brightened and he pursed his orange lips. But he didn’t say anything. Neither did Delvin.
In the twitchy second or two as they gazed at each other, seconds Maylene spoke into, telling the Ghost to take this man up to the Mockingbird room, he saw his life aimed at this spot like an arrow shot years before, launched into the darktown sky on the July day he was born, anniversary of the futile Union victory at Gettysburg, and fallen here, in a cathouse on Red Row. An ache like an old terrible wound began to throb in his side. Heat flooded his chest and into his face. He steadied himself on the fat yellow arm of the couch he stood beside. He wanted to scream — blast all the crusted-over tears from his body.