Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

All afternoon Robyn cleared out, scrubbed, and rinsed off Ptolemy’s bathroom. She brought out every rag, box, towel, and doodad, showing it to her guardian’s great-uncle before throwing it almost all away in big black garbage bags. There were stains on her little black dress, and her hair was getting wild. But she laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy reporting to Ptolemy.

“Do you want this old toothbrush, sir?” she asked with a knowing smile.

He had to study everything she brought to him. At first he didn’t know what it was he was looking at, and then, when he identified the object, he’d get lost trying to remember where it came from.

“That bresh was Sensie’s, I’m pretty sure,” he said. “She got it at the Woolworth’s . . . No. Maybe not. I don’t know where she got it at.”

“But do you want to keep it?” Robyn asked again.

“I guess not. No. You can th’ow it away . . . I guess.”

Hours and hours Robyn cleaned, taking breaks now and then to discuss bits of detritus found in Ptolemy’s bathroom. She filled five thirty-nine-gallon lawn bags with the debris from just that one room. She scrubbed and swept and mopped, and then scrubbed and swept and mopped again.

Once she found an old sepia photograph way down under the sink. It was the picture of a huge brown woman holding the hand of a skinny, frowning little boy.

“Who is this, Mr. Grey?” she asked, coming out to see him.

Ptolemy had set his folding stool right at the door so that he could see everything the teenager was doing.

“Oh, don’t throw that away. No, no.”

He took the crumbling photograph in his hand. It had once been five inches by eight but now the corners and sides had been eaten away by damp rot. The woman’s face was water-stained, as was the bottom half of the boy’s body. He held the picture gently, as if holding a wounded creature.

“That’s my mother,” he whispered, “and her son . . . me.”

“Let me put that away someplace safe so we can take it to the drug sto’ copycat to see if they can make a good print of it,” she said, taking the fragile memory from the man’s thick black fingers.

After a while Ptolemy stopped watching Robyn’s every move. He could see that she knew what was important and that she looked into every corner and fold.

“Come on in, Mr. Grey,” Robyn called in the early evening.

The bathroom was sparkling, neat and clean. The blue tile floor was eroded in places, and there were stains and dings on the blue porcelain sink, but the bathtub was glistening white and the walls were a lovely if faded aqua.

“There’s water damage on the ceiling,” she said, “and I can’t wear no dress the next time I come. And look ...”

Robyn pushed the white ceramic handle on the toilet and the stained commode flushed for the first time in many years.

“You fixed the toilet?” he asked. “You must be like a plumber too.”

“No, I just cleaned it out and turned on the water, that’s all. It worked once it was clean.”

This made sense to Ptolemy. He went to sit on the edge of the tub and ran his fingers over the smooth white porcelain.

“There’s some leaks and stuff, but we can get somebody to fix all that.”

“Landlord won’t fix nuthin’,” Ptolemy said, peering closely enough at the porcelain to see the barest reflection of his dark face in the deep whiteness.

“I gotta go, Mr. Grey. It’s gettin’ late.”

“I never seen nuthin’ like this,” he said. “I don’t even remembah half of what it looked like in here. How did you know?”

“I jes’ cleaned. But I gotta go. Now you can go to the bathroom in your own house. I’ll come back day after tomorrow and we’ll start on your bedroom.”

“Oh no,” Ptolemy said. There was a big black moth fluttering in the center of his heart. “No. Best to leave well enough alone.”

“You need a bed, baby. A place where you can sleep up off the flo’.”

“No.”

“Uh-huh,” she sang. “Day aftah tomorrah I’m’a come back and we gonna tackle the bedroom together. Don’t worry, I won’t th’ow out nuthin’ you don’t want me to.”

“But this is enough, don’t you think?” Ptolemy asked, still running a hand over the cool ceramic rim.

“I got to go, Mr. Grey. Okay?”

“Okay.”

At the open door of the apartment Robyn and Ptolemy stood face-to-face. They both seemed a little confused. Finally she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek, after which he put his hands on either side of her face and curled his fingers like clawless paws.

Ptolemy couldn’t speak because he had more than one thing to say. The first was that he didn’t want her to go into the bedroom. He didn’t need a bed. He didn’t want to be in that room, not ever. But he also wanted Robyn to come back and be there with him. Maybe she could clean the bathroom again.

She kissed him a second time and then walked away down the hall. When she got to the front door of the building she turned and waved before going out the door. He stood there for long minutes with the news and medieval recorder music behind him. He watched that closed door with many people on his mind: Robyn, and Coydog, and Reggie, who had been coming to his house for more than five years.

Then Reggie the man was standing next him in the hall but next to them was Reggie the corpse in the whitewashed pine coffin. The children were on the floor. Ptolemy wanted to call to them but couldn’t remember their names.

“Children shouldn’t be in the room wit’ dead peoples, Reggie,” he said into the empty corridor but also, in his mind, he was in the small bedroom of Niecie’s house where the dead man lay.

The front door to the hall came open and a woman the color of dark redwood came in carrying a bundle of envelopes and magazines. She looked familiar.

“Mr. Grey?” she said, walking toward him.

He usually slammed the door and threw the locks when someone came in the building but this time Ptolemy hesitated.

“Miss Dartman?”

Approaching him, the tall colored woman said, “I haven’t seen your face in almost two years, Mr. Grey. Sometimes I be droppin’ the mail in your slot and I think, ‘Maybe he’s dead in there.’”

“Not me. Old Man Death done lost my numbah, I think.”

The phrase was used by Coy McCann when someone hadn’t seen him for a while and assumed that he’d died. Almost all of Ptolemy’s automatic coherent sentences came from his old friend Coydog.

The tall woman smiled and handed Ptolemy a bundle of mail.

“I was outta town seein’ my brother for the last few days so I didn’t get the mail. Maybe I should give you back the key so that nice grandnephew of yours could collect it for you.”

“Reggie got hisself killed.”

“No!” Miss Falona Dartman cried. “How did that happen?”

“They lynched him. A mob drived by and kilt him.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Grey. He was ...” she said, and then sighed. “He was such a nice young man. Oh no. What are they doin’ to our young black men?”

“Killin’ ’em,” Ptolemy said. “What they always done.”

“Who’s gonna come take care of you now, Mr. Grey? You can’t be here all by yourself.”

“My great-granddaughter Robyn come from down Alabama, or someplace, to he’p me out. She cleaned up my bafroom today. Worked all day at it. All day long she cleaned and th’ew away garbage. But I’ma miss Reggie.”

“Was he married?”

Ptolemy nodded. “An’ they had some kids.”

“Oh no.”

Ptolemy placed the mail in a neat stack on Robyn’s lawn chair. Then he went into the bathroom, put the top lid down on the commode, and sat there. Robyn had brought new lightbulbs and screwed them into the seven sockets above the sink. The light was so white in there that it made him laugh. He was happy sitting on the toilet and watching the bathtub.