The collected short fict.., p.62
The Collected Short Fiction, page 62
“Clerked a grocery store. Taught music.”
“Did you wait on bad men in the grocery store?”
“If I did,” Oliver said swiftly, “I didn’t know about it.”
“Neither did I,” Miss Parkhurst said. Then, more quietly, “Most of the time.”
“All those girls you’ve made whore for you . . .”
“You have some things to learn,” she interrupted. “It’s not the work that’s so awful. It’s what you have to be to do it. The way people expect you to be when you do it. Should be, in a good world, a whore’s like a doctor or a saint, she doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty any more than they do. She gives pleasure and smiles. But in the city, people won’t let it happen that way. Here, a whore’s always got some empty place inside her, a place you’ve filled with self-respect, maybe. A whore’s got respect, but not for herself. She loses that whenever anybody looks at her. She can be worth a million dollars on the outside, but inside, she knows. That’s what makes her a whore. That’s the curse. It’s beat into you sometimes, everybody taking advantage, like you’re dirt. Pretty soon you think you’re dirt, too, and who cares what happens to dirt? Pretty soon you’re just sliding along, trying to keep from getting hurt or maybe dead, but who cares?”
“You’re rich,” Oliver said.
“Can’t buy everything,” Miss Parkhurst commented dryly.
“You’ve got magic.”
“I’ve got magic because I’m here, and to stay here, I have to be a whore.”
“Why can’t you leave?”
She sighed, her fingers working nervously along the edge of the tablecloth.
“What stops you from just leaving?”
“If you’re going to take this place,” she said, and he thought at first she was avoiding his question, “you’ve got to know all about it. All about me.
We’re the same, almost, this place and I. A whore’s no more than what’s in her purse, every pimp knows that. You know how many times I’ve been married?”
Oliver shook his head.
“Seventeen times. Sometimes they left me, once or twice they stayed. Never any good. But then, maybe I didn’t deserve any better. Those who left me, they came back when they were old, asking me to save them from Darkside. I couldn’t. But I kept them here anyway. Come on.”
She stood and Oliver followed her down the halls, down the stairs, below the garage level, deep beneath the mansion’s clutter-filled basement. The air was ageless, deep-earth cool, and smelled of old city rain. A few eternal clear light bulbs cast feeble yellow crescents in the dismal murk. They walked on boards over an old muddy patch, Miss Parkhurst lifting her skirts a few inches to clear the mire. Oliver saw her slim ankles and swallowed back the tightness in his throat.
Ahead, laid out in a row on moss-patched concrete biers, were fifteen black iron cylinders, each seven feet long and slightly flattened on top. They looked like big blockbuster bombs in storage. The first was wedged into a dark comer. Miss Parkhurst stood by its foot, running her hand along its rust-streaked surface.
“Two didn’t come back. Maybe they were the best of the lot,” she said. “I was no judge. I couldn’t know. You judge men by what’s inside you, and if you’re hollow, they get lost in there, you can’t know what you’re seeing.” Oliver stepped closer to the last cylinder and saw a clear glass plate mounted at the head. Reluctant but fascinated, he wiped the dusty glass with two fingers and peered past a single cornered bubble. The coffin was filled with clear liquid. Afloat within, a face the color of green olives in a martini looked back at him, blind eyes murky, lips set in a loose line. The liquid and death had smoothed the face’s wrinkles, but Oliver could tell nonetheless, this dude had been old, old.
“They all die,” she said. “All but me. I keep them all, every john, every husband, no forgetting, no letting them go. We’ve always got this tie between us. That’s the curse.”
Oliver pulled back from the coffin, holding his breath, heart thumping with eager horror. Which was worse, this, or old men in the night? Old dead lusts laid to rest or lively ghosts? Wrapped in gloom at the far end of the line of bottle-coffins, Miss Parkhurst seemed for a moment to glow with the same furnace power he had felt when he first saw her.
“I miss some of these guys,” she said, her voice so soft the power just vanished, a thing in his mind. “We had some good times together.” Oliver tried to imagine what Miss Parkhurst had lived through, the good times and otherwise. “You have any children?” he asked, his voice as thin as the buzz of a fly in a bottle. He jumped back as one of the coffins resonated with his shaky words.
Miss Parkhurst’s shoulders slumped. “Lots,” she said. “All dead before they were born.”
At first his shock was conventional, orchestrated by his Sundays in church. Then the colossal organic waste of effort came down on him like a pile of stones. All that motion, all that wanting, and nothing good from it, just these iron bottles and vivid lists of ghosts.
“What good is a whore’s baby?” Miss Parkhurst asked. “Especially if the mother’s going to stay a whore.”
“Was your mother . . . ?” It didn’t seem right to use the word in connection with anyone’s mother.
“She was, and her mother before her. I have no daddies, or lots of daddies.”
Oliver remembered the old man chastising him in his dream. Before he could even sort out his words, wishing to give her some solace, some sign he wasn’t completely unsympathetic, he said, “It can’t be all bad, being a whore.”
“Maybe not,” she said. Miss Parkhurst hardly made a blot in the larger shadows. She might just fly away to dust if he turned his head.
“You said being a whore is being empty inside. Not everybody who’s empty inside is a whore.”
“Oh?” she replied, light as a cobweb. He was being pushed into an uncharacteristic posture, but Oliver was damned if he’d give in just yet, however much a fool he made of himself. His mixed feelings were betraying him.
“You’ve lived,” he said. “You got memories nobody else has. You could write books. They’d make movies about you.”
Her smile was a dull lamp in the shadows. “I’ve had important people visit me,” she said. “Powerful men, even mayors. I had something they needed. Sometimes they opened up and talked about how hard it was not being little boys any more. Sometimes, when we were relaxing, they’d cry on my shoulder, just like I was their momma. But then they’d go away and try to forget about me. If they remembered at all, they were scared of me, because of what I knew about them. Now, they know I’m getting weak,” she said. “I don’t give a damn about books or movies. I won’t tell what I know, and besides, lots of those men are dead. If they aren’t, they’re waiting for me to die, so they can sleep easy.”
“What do you mean, getting weak?”
“I got two days, maybe three, then I die a whore. My time is up. The curse is almost finished.”
Oliver gaped. When he had first seen her, she had seemed as powerful as a diesel locomotive, as if she might live forever.
“And if I take over?”
“You get the mansion, the money.”
“How much power?”
She didn’t answer.
“You can’t give me any power, can you?”
“No,” faint as the breeze from her eyelashes.
“The opener won’t be any good.”
“No.”
“You lied to me.”
“I’ll leave you all that’s left.”
“That’s not why you made me come here. You took Momma—”
“She stole from me.”
“My momma never stole anything!” Oliver shouted. The iron coffins buzzed.
“She took something after I had given her all my hospitality.”
“What could she take from you? She was no thief.”
“She took a sheet of music.”
Oliver’s face screwed up in sudden pain. He looked away, fists clenched. They had almost no money for his music. More often than not since his father died, he made up music, having no new scores to play. “Why’d you bring me here?” he croaked.
“I don’t mind dying. But I don’t want to die a whore.”
Oliver turned back, angry again, this time for his momma as well as himself. He approached the insubstantial shadow. Miss Parkhurst shimmered like a curtain. “What do you want from me?”
“I need someone who loves me. Loves me for no reason.”
For an instant, he saw standing before him a scrawny girl in a red shimmy, eyes wide. “How could that help you? Can that make you something else?”
“Just love,” she said. “Just letting me forget all these,” she pointed to the coffins, “and all those,” pointing up.
Oliver’s body lost its charge of anger and accusation with an exhaled breath. “I can’t love you,” he said. “I don’t even know what love is.” Was this true? Upstairs, she had burned in his mind, and he had wanted her, though it upset him to remember how much. What could he feel for her? “Let’s go back now. I have to look in on Momma.”
Miss Parkhurst emerged from the shadows and walked past him silently, not even her skirts rustling. She gestured with a finger for him to follow.
She left him at the door to his room, saying, “I’ll wait in the main parlor.” Oliver saw a small television set on the nightstand by his bed and rushed to turn it on. The screen filled with static and unresolved images. He saw fragments of faces, patches of color and texture passing so quickly he couldn’t make them out. The entire city might be on the screen at once, but he could not see any of it clearly. He twisted the channel knob and got more static. Then he saw the label past channel 13 on the dial: home, in small golden letters. He twisted the knob to that position and the screen cleared.
Momma lay in bed, legs drawn tightly up, hair mussed. She didn’t look good. Her hand, stretched out across the bed, trembled. Her breathing was hard and rough. In the background, Oliver heard Yolanda fussing with the babies, finally screaming at her older brothers in frustration.
Why don’t you help with the babies? his sister demanded in a tinny, distant voice.
Momma told you, Denver replied.
She did not. She told us all. You could help.
Reggie laughed. We got plans to make.
Oliver pulled back from the TV. Momma was sick, and for all his brothers and sister and the babies could do, she might die. He could guess why she was sick, too; with worry for him. He had to go to her and tell her he was all right. A phone call wouldn’t be enough.
Again, however, he was reluctant to leave the mansion and Miss Parkhurst. Something beyond her waning magic was at work here; he wanted to listen to her and to experience more of that fascinated horror. He wanted to watch her again, absorb her smooth, ancient beauty. In a way, she needed him as much as Momma did. Miss Parkhurst outraged everything in him that was lawful and orderly, but he finally had to admit, as he thought of going back to Momma, that he enjoyed the outrage.
He clutched the gold opener and ran from his room to the parlor. She waited for him there in a red velvet chair, hands gripping two lions at the end of the armrests. The lions’ wooden faces grinned beneath her caresses. “I got to go,” he said. “Momma’s sick for missing me.”
She nodded. “I’m not holding you,” she said.
He stared at her. “I wish I could help you,” he said.
She smiled hopefully, pitifully. “Then promise you’ll come back.”
Oliver wavered. How long would Momma need him? What if he gave his promise and returned and Miss Parkhurst was already dead?
“I promise.”
“Don’t be too long,” she said.
“Won’t,” he mumbled.
The limousine waited for him in the garage, white and beautiful, languid and sleek and fast all at once. No chauffeur waited for him this time. The door opened by itself and he climbed in; the door closed behind him, and he leaned back stiffly on the leather seats, gold opener in hand. “Take me home,” he said. The glass partition and the windows all around darkened to an opaque smoky gold. He felt a sensation of smooth motion. What would it be like to have this kind of power all the time?
But the power wasn’t hers to give.
Oliver arrived before the apartment building in a blizzard of swirling snow. Snow packed up over the curbs and coated the sidewalks a foot deep; Sleepside was heavy with winter. Oliver stepped from the limousine and climbed the icy steps, the cold hardly touching him even in his light clothing. He was surrounded by Miss Parkhurst’s magic.
Denver was frying a pan of navy beans in the kitchen when Oliver burst through the door, the locks flinging themselves open before him. Oliver paused in the entrance to the kitchen. Denver stared at him, face slack, too surprised to speak.
“Where’s Momma?”
Yolanda heard his voice in the living room and screamed.
Reggie met him in the hallway, arms open wide, smiling broadly. “Goddamn, little brother! You got away?”
“Where’s Momma?”
“She’s in her room. She’s feeling low.”
“She’s sick,” Oliver said, pushing past his brother. Yolanda stood before Momma’s door as if to keep Oliver out. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth. She looked scared.
“Let me by, Yolanda,” Oliver said. He almost pointed the opener at her, and then pulled back, fearful of what might happen.
“You made Momma si-ick,” Yolanda squeaked, but she stepped aside. Oliver pushed through the door to Momma’s room. She sat up in bed, face drawn and thin, but her eyes danced with joy. “My boy!” she sighed. “My beautiful boy.”
Oliver sat beside her and they hugged fiercely. “Please don’t leave me again,” Momma said, voice muffled by his shoulder. Oliver set the opener on her flimsy nightstand and cried against her neck.
The day after Oliver’s return, Denver stood lank-legged by the window, hands in frayed pants pockets, staring at the snow with heavy-lidded eyes. “It’s too cold to go anywheres now,” he mused.
Reggie sat in their father’s chair, face screwed in thought. “I listened to what he told Momma,” he said. “That whore sent our little brother back here in a limo. A big white limo. See it out there?”
Denver peered down at the street. A white limousine waited at the curb, not even dusted by snow. A tiny vanishing curl of white rose from its tailpipe. “It’s still there,” he said.
“Did you see what he had when he came in?” Reggie asked. Denver shook his head. “A gold box. She must have given that to him. I bet whoever has that gold box can visit Miss Belle Parkhurst. Want to bet?”
Denver grinned and shook his head again.
“Wouldn’t be too cold if we had that limo, would it?” Reggie asked.
Oliver brought his momma chicken soup and a half-rotten, carefully trimmed orange. He plumped her pillow for her, shushing her, telling her not to talk until she had eaten. She smiled weakly, beatific, and let him minister to her. When she had eaten, she lay back and closed her eyes, tears pooling in their hollows before slipping down her cheeks. “I was so afraid for you,” she said. “I didn’t know what she would do. She seemed so nice at first. I didn’t see her. Just her voice, inviting me in over the security buzzer, letting me sit and rest my feet. I knew where I was . . . was it bad of me, to stay there, knowing?”
“You were tired, Momma,” Oliver said. “Besides, Miss Parkhurst isn’t that bad.”
Momma looked at him dubiously. “I saw her piano. There was a shelf next to it with the most beautiful sheet music you ever saw, even big books of it. I looked at some. Oh, Oliver, I’ve never taken anything in my life . . .
She cried freely now, sapping what little strength the lunch had given her.
“Don’t you worry, Momma. She used you. She wanted me to come.” As an afterthought, she added, not sure why he lied, “Or Yolanda.” Momma absorbed that while her eyes examined his face in tiny, caressing glances. “You won’t go back,” she said, “will you?”
Oliver looked down at the sheets folded under her arms. “I promised. She’ll die if I don’t,” he said.
“That woman is a liar,” Momma stated unequivocally. “If she wants you, she’ll do anything to get you.”
“I don’t think she’s lying, Momma.”
She looked away from him, a feverish anger flushing her cheeks. “Why did you promise her?”
“She’s not that bad, Momma,” he said again. He had thought that coming home would clear his mind, but Miss Parkhurst’s face, her plea, stayed with him as if she were only a room away. The mansion seemed just a fading dream, unimportant; but Belle Parkhurst stuck. “She needs help. She wants to change.”
Momma puffed out her cheeks and blew through her lips like a horse. She had often done that to his father, never before to him. “She’ll always be a whore,” she said.
Oliver’s eyes narrowed. He saw a spitefulness and bitterness in Momma he hadn’t noticed before. Not that spite was unwarranted; Miss Parkhurst had treated Momma roughly. Yet . . .
Denver stood in the doorway. “Reggie and I got to talk to Momma,” he said. “About you.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Alone.” Reggie stood grinning behind his brother. Oliver took the tray of dishes and sidled past them, going into the kitchen.
In the kitchen, he washed the last few days’ plates methodically, letting the lukewarm water slide over his hands, eyes focused on the faucet’s dull gleam. He had almost lost track of time when he heard the front door slam. Jerking his head up, he wiped the last plate and put it away, then went to Momma’s room. She looked back at him guiltily. Something was wrong. He searched the room with his eyes, but nothing was out of place. Nothing that was normally present . . .
The opener.
His brothers had taken the gold opener.
“Momma!” he said.
“They’re going to pay her a visit,” she said, the bitterness plain now. “They don’t like their momma mistreated.”
It was getting dark and the snow was thick. He had hoped to return this evening. If Miss Parkhurst hadn’t lied, she would be very weak by now, perhaps dead tomorrow. His lungs seemed to shrink within him, and he had a hard time taking a breath.
