Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He began to ask for the names and addresses and the telephone numbers when they had them of the more likely-looking women. He questioned them, discreetly, so he thought, about their situation. Were they married? What did they think of the mortuary business? Didn’t they just love the swank and the soundness of the outfit? Did they know that those velvet curtains over there cost nearly one hundred dollars? That organ in the chapel was over a thousand dollars and Mr. Oliver was planning to buy an even better one soon. He tried to enlist Polly’s help, but she was not a willing accomplice. She told him if he didn’t cut it out she was going to tell Mr. O.

“He’s a lonely man,” Delvin said.

“Mr. Oliver is too busy to be lonely,” Polly replied.

But Delvin knew his loneliness. They had begun to read Shakespeare’s sonnets. The ones that spoke of the absent lover touched them both. In the dim light of the big green-shaded lamp by the bed they had both wiped away tears, Mr. O dabbing with the corner of a blue silk handkerchief, Delvin using the tips of his fingers.

“Here he’s saying the only way to live forever is to get yourself a child,” Delvin said after reading sonnet no. 12. “If you are going to get a child, you have to first get yourself a wife. Or a woman.”

Delvin knew his mother had not married his father. He had been much too young to investigate such business, but once before she ran off as they sat side by side in the God Is Love Beauty Parlor over on Forrest street waiting for Cappie to get her thick crozzled hair straightened, he had asked who his father was and she told him he was a man from the west — an actor, she said. There was a tiny note of pride in her voice. It made Delvin feel as if his daddy was a somebody for sure. Maybe he had acted in Mr. Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe in Othello , which was their favorite.

A colored general married to a white woman — it seemed a strange dream, so impossible, fantastical, that it had left them breathless. But after that first shock when sitting side by side at the little mahogany table upon which burned an electric lamp softly shaded by a gold paper shade, as they apprehended not simply the facts of the situation but the lack of fear and shame and, better even than that, the kowtowing he received, it seemed a right and proper notion. They saw too how despite the victories he won for them the people of Venice looked down on the general, even as they bowed to him. “Can’t get too important not to get your tail set on fire — if you’re a black man,” Oliver pointed out. Delvin saw it too.

“He works for em,” he said. “He’s the one they hired to clean up their messes.” He said this more to ingratiate himself with Oliver — to get the love going, to nestle deeper into this man’s heart — than anything else. “But what about his getting married to that woman?” he said. This excited Delvin.

“Cast that from your mind,” Oliver said. A strange look came into his broad face. “It might be a thrill for some,” he said. “But not everybody wants to strike that note.” He sighed. “Truth is, you never can tell where love is going to hit.”

How true, Delvin thought. He was in love with Polly — love had hit him, the soft thin kind that comes in early youth — but he knew it didn’t amount to much because Polly, who herself was in love with one of the yardmen, had told him so. The ache had already begun to subside. And he was sure he could find a wife for Mr. Oliver. He had two candidates in mind. Miss Plurafore Conner and Mrs. Duplaine Misty. Miss Conner had a little candy shop over on Washington street and Mrs. Duplaine was the widow of Mr. Stephen Misty, former principal of the colored high school over on Brickson avenue. Both women had seemed suitably impressed by the deluxe Constitution Funeral Home accommodations they enjoyed at the funerals where he had first spied them. Miss Conner, a slim woman quick to tremble and shudder, had buried her father from the Home, and Mrs. Duplaine, a portly, emotional woman, had spent hours with Mr. O going over the special arrangements she wanted for her husband’s funeral (cornet band, all-white flowers and four dumpling-sized gilt rings on his fingers). It had been Mr. O’s arm she leaned on — instead of her feckless son’s (a nightclub singer living with a white woman said to be an ether addict— there’s your Chattanooga Othello) when she wobbled down the aisle of the Mt. Moriah Baptist church. Mr. O had put together a perfect service for her, including a choir of pink-robed singers at the gravesite. As the last strains of “Cross Over into Campground” had faded into the pines, Delvin had noticed Mr. Oliver’s eyes wet with tears. It was true that Mr. Oliver was known to weep at funerals — some mocked it as put-on — but Delvin knew him as a man of great feeling. Mrs. D saw this too; Delvin noticed her swiveling an eye in Mr. O’s direction as he stood tall and plump by one of the brass poles supporting the green canvas tent over the grave. He had asked tenderly if she wanted to place anything else in the casket’s little memento drawer and, when she said yes, helped her get the reluctant slide to work and shielded her as she placed what looked to Delvin like a dried cat’s head in it; he saw how she appreciated this thoughtfulness. His hand cupped over her hand clutching his arm, he had held on later as she swayed keening over the casket as it was cranked down into the layered red and yellow clay. Mr. O had ridden with her back to the Home and served her brandy and let her cry on his shoulder and then he’d had Willie Burt drive her home in her own new Buick and sent Elmer in the big car to fetch Willie Burt, who came in whistling and smelling of liquor.

Mr. Oliver had been similarly attentive to Miss Conner who had needed help with the music for the service and in deciding which suit she wanted her father to wear. She had sat out on the side porch with Mr. Oliver after the funeral and Delvin had heard the creak of the old slat swing far into the night.

When over the next few weeks nothing happened, Delvin decided he had to help the business along. He stole a few sheets of Mr. Oliver’s private stationery, along with envelopes and stamps, and wrote notes to the two women. He suggested to Mr. Oliver that he begin home visiting services, especially to the homes of those whose loved ones had been recently interred. “Seems like a funeral home ought to include such services,” he said. “It idn’t just at the grave that those poor ladies—”

“Which poor ladies?” Mr. Oliver asked. He was at the soapstone sink in the basement outside the embalming room washing his hands with the soap that smelled of lemons.

“Any of em,” Delvin said. “I was thinking especially — because they’re the latest — of Mrs. . ” And he went on to remind Mr. O of the gratefulness shown by the two substantially fixed women whose loved ones he’d just ushered into eternity.

They walked out into the backyard. A new snow had fallen, an inch of glossy powder that emphasized the lines of the old sycamore and the half broken red maple and set tiny gleaming caps on the leaves of the holly bush by the back steps.

“You’re trying to push me into something, aren’t you?”

“What if I was?”

“It won’t do any good, boy.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not fit for such folly as that.”

“Why aint you?”

“Quit saying aint. I’ve told you about it.”

“I forget. I can’t keep every instruction in my mind at all times. My mind is too full of other prospects.”

“Other than becoming a gentleman?”

“What good in this world would that do?”

“Kindness — gentleness — will always do.”

“You just changing the subject.”