T. Boyle - The Women

The mistress — and what should he call her, certainly not Mrs. Wright, because she wasn’t married, was she? — ignored him. Her eyes were the color of week-old cider with the green flecks of mold still floating on the top of it. They never left his wife’s face. “What sort of things do you like to cook, Gertrude — what do you specialize in?”

He tried to answer for her but he barely got the first word out of his mouth before the woman cut him off. And still she wouldn’t look at him. “I want to hear from you, Gertrude. What do you cook?” A dip of the shoulders, a laugh. “Practically anything’d be better than what I’m capable of. .”

Monkey lips, monkey lips. Gertrude gave him a look, squared her shoulders and lifted her eyes. “Jug-jug, pepper pot, fish any way you like it. And conkies. I make conkies they famous all up down Baxter Road.” 168

He couldn’t help himself. “And white people’s food,” he blurted, “—she makes white people’s food too. Of course.”

“Mash potato,” Gertrude sang out. “Ham hock and black-eye pea, pig he feet, bee’steak in de pan, frittah, dat sort t’ing.”

And here he was, not five minutes into that house and that job of work, and he was hotter than any iron in any smithy’s shop in the whole godforsaken country — peasant talk, low ignorance and the smart of humiliation like a stingaree lashed across his face — and he couldn’t contain himself to save his life. “Hush,” he hissed, jerking his face to hers, every line knitted, “you just shut that, woman! You don’t talk like that. You don’t ever.” He was going to add, Is that the way I taught you? his right hand, his slapping hand, trembling so hard he had to shove it in his pocket, but he caught himself. This wasn’t the place. But what place was it? Where was he?

The dishwater man rotated his toe. Gertrude stared at the carpet. In his head, sailing high in quick blooming bursts, were the rockets people sent up arcing over the night-black void of the sea on Empire Day, pop-pop, pop-pop. And the mistress — Borthwick, Mrs. Borthwick, was that what the dishwater man had called her? — puffed herself up like a crapaud frog and let her voice rise two levels. “And, you, ” she said, pinning him with her eyes while the words rattled like steel blades in her throat, “you will not talk to her in that tone of voice, not in my presence, not in this house.” There was a silence. The earth stopped dead, transfixed on its axis. “Is that understood?”

He could have said anything, could have lost all he’d wanted and dreamed of right then and there and found himself back on that yellow-hairedtrain again, disgraced and disrespected, his poor black peasant Bajan wife crying on his shoulder, but all he said was, “Yes, ma’am.”

Out beyond her, beyond the carpet and the bookcase and the lobster-trap chair and all the rest, the sun suddenly exploded through the clouds in a fiery pillar that silhouetted her like some unearthly being, and he saw that sun and that room and the look on her face and fought himself down. He could never be sure afterward but he might even have bowed his head in the way those people in the bushes bowed and ducked away into the shadows when Mr. Brighton or one of the gentlemen or ladies sitting there under their parasols looked out across the lawn. He might have bowed his head. And for what? For what?

He watched her face, saw her arm rise and fall in a dismissive sweep as she ordered the dishwater man to take them off to the kitchen, and then they were moving, he and his wife, following the twitch of the dishwater man’s shoulders across the floor and out of the room. And what did she say, Mrs. Borthwick-Wright, Mrs. High-and-Mighty, in her voice of scorn? “Woman,” she spat, two syllables flung at his back as he retreated and all the while the rockets going off in his head, pop-pop, pop-pop.

She took a dislike to him the minute she laid eyes on him, and she hated to admit it to herself, hated to admit any kind of prejudice, but there it was. It wasn’t his looks. He was a good-looking Negro, light-skinned, with proportional lips and deep chocolate eyes, of medium height, slim and self-contained. No, it was something in his demeanor, the way he held himself, rigid as a pole, as if he’d just been shocked with an electric wire and was waiting for his torturer to throw the switch and shock him again. And the way he looked at her with a kind of cool insolence, as if she were the one applying for the job, as if she had to meet his expectations. She’d never seen anything quite like it, though admittedly her experience of Negroes was limited — she’d seen them in people’s homes serving at table and the like, and she’d encountered a handful of them when she was a librarian in Port Huron in the days before Edwin, but those Negroes were the ones she approved of, hard-working people educating themselves on their own time. Or at least trying.

And yes, this one — Carleton, Julian Carleton — was well-spoken, as Frank had said, and he seemed intelligent, perhaps too intelligent for his own good, but that he attempted to speak for his wife, to take the words out of her mouth, bully her right there in his first interview in the house, simply infuriated her. She had half a mind to telegram to Frank and tell him to find her someone else because she was sending them right back to Chicago on the morning train, but she didn’t. She needed them, needed somebody, anybody, to get her out of the kitchen and back to Ellen Key and her studies and her writing — the life of the mind instead of the scrub brush and the washboard — and perhaps she was being hasty in her judgment. The wife — Gertrude — had seemed sweet and shy. And so young. If Carleton was twenty-five or thereabout, she must have been five years younger, a girl still, eager to please, with real kindness in her eyes — there was a moment there when she actually thought the girl was going to curtsey to her. Her features were regular, almost pretty but for the exaggerated lips, her skin so dark and exotic it seemed to drink up the light. And the way she spoke, with the broad open vowels and the tripping syncopated rhythm that flowed like a song, like a sweet tropical melody played out spontaneously just for her, was perfectly charming.

But could she cook? That would be the test. If she could cook — and the husband serve the way Frank had assured her he could, serve at table and take up the household chores with some of the rigor that had held him frozen there on the carpet — then she was sure she’d be able to get over the awkwardness of that first impression. It was probably nothing, she told herself. He was uneasy, that was all. Trying to make a good impression. She couldn’t really blame him for that, could she?

She settled back in her chair. Took up her book again. Before long, she was immersed in her work, the afternoon absorbed in the flow of her hand and the rush of sentiments crowding her mind, and if she thought of the new help at all it was in the silences. Somewhere, at the margins of her consciousness, she might have heard a door open and shut again, might have detected the smallest sounds drifting in from the kitchen — a drawer sliding out, a knife at the whetstone, water running in the sink — but it was the long intervals of silence that made her feel that the house was in good hands, nothing amiss, the routine establishing itself by increments from one tranquil moment to the next. She took her dinner privately that evening, out on the little screened-in porch overlooking the lake, and he set the table and served her properly, without any fuss or a single wasted word. And the food — vegetable soup, tomato salad, a steak the wife had rubbed with a combination of exotic spices that managed to be piquant and savory at the same time, cob corn, potatoes braised in the pan with rosemary from the garden and a dessert of custard flavored with vanilla bean and cinnamon — was better than anything she’d tasted since she’d come back from Europe. She took two glasses of wine with her meal and had a brandy afterward, and for the longest while she just sat there staring off into the distance while the ducks and geese settled in on the lake and the shadows deepened and the fireflies traced their punctuated patterns across the night.