The cloudy gray circle identified the place where the bowl filled every day during the doctor’s life with fresh flowers had stood. Every day. And when there were no flowers, it held a leaf arrangement, a gathering of twigs and berries, pussy willow, Scotch pine…. But always something to grace the dinner table in the evening.
It was for her father a touch that distinguished his own family from the people among whom they lived. For Ruth it was the summation of the affectionate elegance with which she believed her childhood had been surrounded. When Macon married her and moved into Doctor’s house, she kept up the centerpiece-arranging. Then came the time she walked down to the shore through the roughest part of the city to get some driftwood. She had seen an arrangement of driftwood and dried seaweed in the homemakers section of the newspaper. It was a damp November day, and Doctor was paralyzed even then and taking liquid food in his bedroom. The wind had lifted her skirt from around her ankles and cut through her laced shoes. She’d had to rub her feet down with warm olive oil when she got back. At dinner, where just the two of them sat, she turned toward her husband and asked him how he liked the centerpiece. “Most people overlook things like that. They see it, but they don’t see anything beautiful in it. They don’t see that nature has already made it as perfect as it can be. Look at it from the side. It is pretty, isn’t it?”
Her husband looked at the driftwood with its lacy beige seaweed, and without moving his head, said, “Your chicken is red at the bone. And there is probably a potato dish that is supposed to have lumps in it. Mashed ain’t the dish.”
Ruth let the seaweed disintegrate, and later, when its veins and stems dropped and curled into brown scabs on the table, she removed the bowl and brushed away the scabs. But the water mark, hidden by the bowl all these years, was exposed. And once exposed, it behaved as though it were itself a plant and flourished into a huge suede-gray flower that throbbed like fever, and sighed like the shift of sand dunes. But it could also be still. Patient, restful, and still.
But there was nothing you could do with a mooring except acknowledge it, use it for the verification of some idea you wanted to keep alive. Something else is needed to get from sunup to sundown: a balm, a gentle touch or nuzzling of some sort. So Ruth rose up and out of her guileless inefficiency to claim her bit of balm right after the preparation of dinner and just before the return of her husband from his office. It was one of her two secret indulgences—the one that involved her son—and part of the pleasure it gave her came from the room in which she did it. A damp greenness lived there, made by the evergreen that pressed against the window and filtered the light. It was just a little room that Doctor had called a study, and aside from a sewing machine that stood in the corner along with a dress form, there was only a rocker and tiny footstool. She sat in this room holding her son on her lap, staring at his closed eyelids and listening to the sound of his sucking. Staring not so much from maternal joy as from a wish to avoid seeing his legs dangling almost to the floor.
In late afternoon, before her husband closed his office and came home, she called her son to her. When he came into the little room she unbuttoned her blouse and smiled. He was too young to be dazzled by her nipples, but he was old enough to be bored by the flat taste of mother’s milk, so he came reluctantly, as to a chore, and lay as he had at least once each day of his life in his mother’s arms, and tried to pull the thin, faintly sweet milk from her flesh without hurting her with his teeth.
She felt him. His restraint, his courtesy, his indifference, all of which pushed her into fantasy. She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from her a thread of light. It was as though she were a cauldron issuing spinning gold. Like the miller’s daughter—the one who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power Rumpelstiltskin had given her: to see golden thread stream from her very own shuttle. And that was the other part of her pleasure, a pleasure she hated to give up. So when Freddie the janitor, who liked to pretend he was a friend of the family and not just their flunky as well as their tenant, brought his rent to the doctor’s house late one day and looked in the window past the evergreen, the terror that sprang to Ruth’s eyes came from the quick realization that she was to lose fully half of what made her daily life bearable. Freddie, however, interpreted her look as simple shame, but that didn’t stop him from grinning.
“Have mercy. I be damn.”
He fought the evergreen for a better look, hampered more by his laughter than by the branches. Ruth jumped up as quickly as she could and covered her breast, dropping her son on the floor and confirming for him what he had begun to suspect—that these were strange and wrong.
Before either mother or son could speak, rearrange themselves properly, or even exchange looks, Freddie had run around the house, climbed the porch steps, and was calling them between gulps of laughter.
“Miss Rufie. Miss Rufie. Where you? Where you all at?” He opened the door to the green room as though it were his now.
“I be damn, Miss Rufie. When the last time I seen that? I don’t even know the last time I seen that. I mean, ain’t nothing wrong with it. I mean, old folks swear by it. It’s just, you know, you don’t see it up here much….” But his eyes were on the boy. Appreciative eyes that communicated some complicity she was excluded from. Freddie looked the boy up and down, taking in the steady but secretive eyes and the startling contrast between Ruth’s lemony skin and the boy’s black skin. “Used to be a lot of womenfolk nurse they kids a long time down South. Lot of ’em. But you don’t see it much no more. I knew a family—the mother wasn’t too quick, though—nursed hers till the boy, I reckon, was near ‘bout thirteen. But that’s a bit much, ain’t it?” All the time he chattered, he rubbed his chin and looked at the boy. Finally he stopped, and gave a long low chuckle. He’d found the phrase he’d been searching for. “A milkman. That’s what you got here, Miss Rufie. A natural milkman if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come. Huh!”
Freddie carried his discovery not only into the homes in Ruth’s neighborhood, but to Southside, where he lived and where Macon Dead owned rent houses. So Ruth kept close to home and had no afternoon guests for the better part of two months, to keep from hearing that her son had been rechristened with a name he was never able to shake and that did nothing to improve either one’s relationship with his father.
Macon Dead never knew how it came about—how his only son acquired the nickname that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it. It was a matter that concerned him a good deal, for the giving of names in his family was always surrounded by what he believed to be monumental foolishness. No one mentioned to him the incident out of which the nickname grew because he was a difficult man to approach—a hard man, with a manner so cool it discouraged casual or spontaneous conversation. Only Freddie the janitor took liberties with Macon Dead, liberties he purchased with the services he rendered, and Freddie was the last person on earth to tell him. So Macon Dead neither heard of nor visualized Ruth’s sudden terror, her awkward jump from the rocking chair, the boy’s fall broken by the tiny footstool, or Freddie’s amused, admiring summation of the situation.
Without knowing any of the details, however, he guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by hatred, that the name he heard schoolchildren call his son, the name he overheard the ragman use when he paid the boy three cents for a bundle of old clothes—he guessed that this name was not clean. Milkman. It certainly didn’t sound like the honest job of a dairyman, or bring to his mind cold bright cans standing on the back porch, glittering like captains on guard. It sounded dirty, intimate, and hot. He knew that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust.
This disgust and the uneasiness with which he regarded his son affected everything he did in that city. If he
