“That’s why you left town, isn’t it?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Might be because I did the same.”
“You saw a lynching, Walter?”
He made an indeterminate noise, something between a snarl and a laugh. “Not quite. They took me and my sister from our mother and our grandparents, gave us to one pious white family after another, stuffed us full of the white man’s god and told us we had to atone for the sins of our fathers. Our skin was the sin, you understand. Our culture. My sister said if she could never go back home she would rather not be here at all. She hung herself. I ran off.”
Shock kept her silent for a long moment. Walter never spoke about his childhood; he never spoke about his life outside of the Pelican. She didn’t know the first thing about where Walter had grown up, not even the state, but she had always known he’d grown up with violence.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” she said, after a moment. “Why did you ever let them call you Red Man?”
Now he did laugh. “Who could understand that better than you, Tammy? Red Man was the price I paid so my sister’s murderers could never touch me again. Their insult became my bullet. And you?”
She had never liked being seen. But with Walter, it didn’t feel so bad.
“I came to New York and asked around for the baddest man in the Village. That’s why I stayed, even though I didn’t like … everything I saw. But he was the whitest white man I’d ever met. He could protect me from anything. With him, nothing could happen to me like what happened to Pete. But it turns out you can’t hide, Walter. Not the way I was doing. You turn around one day and the monster’s dead and his angel wants to put away her knives and pay off debts…”
“Can she?”
She took a shaky breath. “What do I know, Walter? What would someone like me know about that?”
That afternoon, Tamara went to Pea’s room and opened the curtains to let in the weak light.
Pea looked in her direction without turning her head.
“Is that really necessary?”
“You planning on sleeping through the winter?”
Pea sighed. “Sometimes she dreams about him.”
Tammy’s stomach gave a familiar lurch and she grabbed Pea’s cold tea from the bedside table. The lavender and rose hips had gone bitter in the night, but she drank it down straight. That goddamn baby, she thought, and then stopped herself from thinking any more. “Well,” Tamara said, businesslike, “I thought you might like to see this. You keep sleeping through the afternoons.”
Phyllis propped herself up on her elbows. “See what?”
Tammy’s smile came a little more easily now. “Just look out the window.”
Mrs. Grundy came up the driveway at 3:50. As always, she appeared to have walked. Tamara and Phyllis watched in astonishment as the housekeeper proceeded to wait on the front steps, gloved hands crossed in front of her.
Phyllis scooted closer to the window. “What the devil is she waiting for?”
“Just watch,” Tamara said.
“Did she walk from town?”
“She says that she enjoys the exercise.”
“And the cold biting off her nose, apparently!”
Tammy giggled. Some easy warmth returned to her, some of her flailing rage quieted like an exhausted baby. She could not hate Pea. She could not even, in moments like this, believe that the two of them were so very different.
At precisely four o’clock, the housekeeper lifted her right hand. Her knock coincided with the second chime of the grandfather clock.
The display was all Tamara had hoped for; they shared a look and Phyllis burst out laughing.
“No!”
“Every afternoon!”
“Will you get it or should I?”
“You know you’re not supposed to rush.” Tamara jumped up from the bed. “Oh damn, the clock finished chiming, now she’ll just use it as an excuse to moan about how those Negroes are always running late.”
Phyllis started laughing so hard that she choked and Tamara thumped her slightly harder than necessary on the back. It was nearly a minute before Tamara finally made it to the door, where Mrs. Grundy waited, pinch-lipped, actually tapping her foot.
“Oh, you’re here already!” Tamara raised her hand to her cheek in theatrical consternation. From the top of the stairs, a muffled snort made Tamara jump. Mrs. Grundy peered past her into the dim entrance, as though into the lair of a dragon.
“I rang the bell,” said Mrs. Grundy, stiffly.
“Oh, did you?” She put on her best silly girl face, perfected these last few years at the Pelican. It was such a good face; it got her so much freedom—and love, when she wanted it—that there had been long stretches, months at a time, when she’d even believed it herself.
It did its work here; Mrs. Grundy sighed and walked into the front parlor. But Tamara noted, though she did not like to, how stiff that face had sat on her features, how hollow her voice, how empty her eyes. What, she now wondered, had any of those
