that had shiny black buttons from the throat down to the hem. The sleeves went all the way to her wrists. The head of an unblinking red fox peeked at me from her right shoulder.
“Miss Fine?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. Her eyes didn’t waver, they hardly blinked. It was almost as if I were staring into the face of two dead animals, the fox and the woman.
The foyer behind her was as much in disarray as the grounds. There was a large ceramic pot in one corner filled with peacock feathers that were coated in dust. Above this was a large painting of a white woman astride a white stallion galloping away from a squat stone castle.
“May I speak with you, ma’am?”
“Certainly, young man,” she said.
With that she led me to the left, down a long and wide corridor made narrower by stacks of cartons labeled Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply along the walls. There were also piles of documents, newspapers, ledgers, and manuals of all kinds. We came to a room that had a barber’s chair and a park bench for furniture. By then I was pretty sure that I was in a madhouse, or at least in a house that was in the process of going mad.
“Sit down, sit down,” the woman said, waving at the park bench.
She struggled with the barber’s chair. The long skirts and stiffness in her joints made the necessary movements difficult, but she finally managed to seat herself upon the cracked grandeur of the golden leather cushion.
“Miss Fine . . . ,” I said.
She held up her hand to stop me and then shook the same hand. A tinkling accompanied the motion. I saw then that there was a tiny silver bell attached to her wrist. The old woman then stared at a bookcase to her left with great concentration.
The room was quite odd. First of all, it wasn’t so much a room but the dead end of the cluttered hall. There was nothing that seemed normal in there. Besides the park bench and barber’s chair there was an unfinished sawhorse and a high table on which stood three miner’s lanterns. The bookcases were crowded with handmade papier-mache figurines. There were statuettes of black men and women shopping, kneeling in prayer, two men fighting with knives, and dozens of other tableaus.
“Miss Fine,” I said again.
“Shh!”
A man came out from behind the bookcase then. He wore black slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt that was one size too big. His coloring was equal parts brown and drab green, and his eyebrows were thicker than some men’s beards.
“Yes?” he asked with undisguised disdain.
“Oscar, this is my guest,” she said.
He glanced at me with similar condescension.
“Yes, I know. Mr. Minton, who, I am told, was sent by Mr. Milo Sweet.”
“What do we have to offer my guest?” she asked.
“What does he want?”
“Why I . . . ,” she said. “What do you want?” she then asked me, as if some request I had made was the cause of her embarrassment.
“Nothing. Thank you, ma’am.”
“You have to have something,” she said. “You don’t just walk into somebody’s house without accepting their hospitality.”
Miss Fine was staring at me. Oscar was staring at me.
“Tea?” I said.
“Hot tea or ice?” Oscar asked.
“Ice.”
“Milk or lemon?”
Miss Fine giggled and bounced a little in her chair.
“Milk,” I said.
“Sugar?”
“Okay.”
“How many teaspoons?”
“Half of one.”
Oscar’s immense eyebrows rose like two bales of black hay giving way to a great subterranean upheaval.
“Don’t have much of a sweet tooth,” I apologized.
Oscar gave a slight shrug.
“And you?” he asked Miss Fine.
“The usual.”
“It’s rather early, don’t you think?”
