Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“It’s late,” he said as she stood in the space the partly opened door made.

“I know,” she said. They were not whispering and it was nearly two in the morning. Roxanne had stopped banging on the ceiling after about half an hour, and she had not sent anyone to get Agnes.

“You can shut that door in my face and I’ll turn around and leave,” he said.

“Leave? And go back downstairs?” she said. They had never spoken man-and-woman talk like that, but no one listening would have known this.

“I didn’t come from downstairs.”

Once he was inside, she put on her eyeglasses and fixed him a cup of coffee while he sat at the small table at the window, and again she moved about her place without thinking once of the woman below her. The world outside her window looked different to Melvin from one floor up.

“I’ve been thinking of moving from here,” she said after placing the cup and saucer before him and taking the seat across from him.

He said, “I would miss you. It would be like all the pain in the world if I couldn’t see you again.”

The priest who would instruct him in the Catholic faith told him he would have to choose a middle name for himself. “Why?” Melvin would ask. “Because there was no Saint Melvin, and God wants you to have a saint’s name.” Agnes’s father, a Catholic no more, unearthed a small book giving all the saints’ names and why they had been canonized. “Pick one,” his father-in-law-to-be said. “George. Sebastian. John. Pick one…But try to stay away from Xavier. I don’t remember what he did, but that name ain’t done all that right by me.”

For weeks, Agnes and Melvin did no more than talk in the night when the human beings in that building were all away in sleep. And when the talking was done sometime near dawn, he would stand, stretch, drink the last of his coffee, and go off to work. Then, late one night in October, a year after she went blind, Roxanne got up from her bed to go upstairs to the bathroom. Melvin had told her he would be away again that day. Before she had even reached the top of the stairs, she heard a most unfamiliar sound from Agnes’s place—the sound of a woman moaning in pleasure. She knew the sounds Melvin made when he made love, but she did not have to hear him to know he was with Agnes. All that her life was at that moment told her he was in there. And that life, such as it was, flowed out of her and she fell back and had to catch herself before falling down the stairs. She went down four steps and was in such pain that she had to sit. She wanted to cry out, but she prevented that by putting the sleeve of her nightgown in her mouth. I must get back to my place, she thought, even though she knew she lacked the strength. Melvin had always been such a good man, even as she had strayed a few times. What could have happened to him? And to be with such a wretch of a woman. Perhaps, just perhaps, she thought after some time, it was not herself who had been beautiful all those years, but maybe it had always been Agnes.

He came to her three days later, planning to tell her he was taking his life in a different direction and not knowing she had heard Agnes with him. He picked up the chair under the wooden rack and sat across from Roxanne as she sat in the easy chair. He said a great deal but none of it contained the right words, and in the end they heard Agnes moving about upstairs and Roxanne turned to accuse him and he looked away because her eyes were the same as always—not at all milky and full of nothing like those of other blind women. They were as full of life as ever and they told him she saw all as before. They were silent for a time. “You’d best go now,” Roxanne said, “your whore be callin you.” “You got no call.” “I got every call in the world,” and that was the last time for the couple.

The next month Agnes moved away. And a week later a woman, Mercy, came into Roxanne’s store, a woman she had known from all her partying years, a woman she had not seen in a long time. “You still look as good as ever,” the woman said. “Oh, go on away from here,” Roxanne said. They were the best words she had heard since going up that night to the bathroom. “I mean it, girl. I still run across men who go on and on about you. ‘Roxanne this, Roxanne that.’” She invited Roxanne to a party that Saturday night, and Roxanne said as she gave the woman change, “Why not? Why the hell not?” It was so good to talk to the woman Mercy that Roxanne told her to take whatever she wanted, and Mercy took three packs of cigarettes, a package of doughnuts, and two sodas, though she told Roxanne she was taking only one soda and no cigarettes.

She had a sweet old time at the party—her first since Melvin went out of her life. The music, the cigarette smoke, the voices, a woman shrieking with laughter across the room—it was all familiar, and it was all her. Being blind might not be so bad. That Monday a fellow she had met at the party called her job and asked her out to lunch, but she said no. His voice had not grabbed her, and he had held her as they slow-dragged in that way of desperate men—as if he wanted to melt his body into hers. Two days after his call she received a letter from her parents, who asked for the tenth time that year if she wanted them to come up to her. “Don’t fight alone,” they said. “That would be just like you.” Her parents also wrote that Roxanne’s daughter—who had only been told in October, the month before, what had happened to her mother—had been trying to think of what to write. “She needs the time to take it in,” her parents said in a letter of one page. Roxanne had Adele’s brother, Taylor, write a letter to them and get a money order for their train tickets to Washington for an extended Christmas visit. Had it not been for the party, for Mercy telling everyone at the party that the Jewel of Louisiana was back and better than ever, she might have had him write, “My boyfriend abandoned me and I am utterly alone.” “Utterly” was one of the favorite words of an early boyfriend after she first arrived in Washington. “I’m utterly ashamed , baby.” “I’m utterly hungry.” “He was utterly dead.”

When Taylor had finished the letter, he sat in the chair under the wooden rack and studied the stamp on the envelope to make certain all the edges adhered. And after he knew the stamp would stay in place all the way to Antibes Nouveau, he said, “It hurt to be blind, Miss Roxanne?” She had become close to him and his sister and their mother, but the boy was nothing if not a barrel of questions. Maybe that came from having a mother who was a nondrinker. No parties. A life that seemed devoted only to her children. A boy with a mother like that could stop being afraid of asking grown people questions.

“Whatcha think, Taylor?” She was at the sink, putting a wet washcloth to her face.

“I say yes, but Mama said no. It hurt in other ways.”

She touched the washcloth to her throat. The cloth was cool, but she knew that in moments her body would warm it. “Your mama right, Taylor.” She faced the mirror and saw darkness and then turned and could make out the faintest of light in the rest of the room. Would her own daughter be like this boy? Questions, questions, always questions. Blind people, she remembered from the days when she could see, had that jumping thing with their eyes, and she wondered if she would get that, too. One more blow to a beautiful face. Adele had told her only two days ago that her eyes looked like regular eyes. But whatever could that mean? “I suppose blind people hurt in ways you don’t understand now, Taylor.” Maybe it was only people who had been blind for a very long time who got that jumping disease, people who had never learned to teach their eyes to pretend that they could see. She was coming to understand that it was not the questions, but the fear that she would not have the proper answers, answers that would not stand the test of time. If Taylor was this way, how much worse would it be with her own daughter? Who knew what kind of girl she had grown into? “Well, is it like pins in the arm or somethin?” the boy said. “Or gettin shot by a BB gun?”