Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“What, Uncle?” Robyn asked.

“A gift from God,” he said again. “Without you I wouldn’t even be here.”

“Somebody else woulda come,” Robyn said, bowing her head.

“Yeah. They’da come, but I still wouldn’t be here. It’s me that’s the lump’a clay and you that’s the hand of God.”

Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when Ptolemy and Robyn showed up at her door three days later.

He’d needed twenty-four hours to recover from the weakness four days in bed had put on him. The next day he bathed and pondered, read a book called Real Time , and listened to jazz on the radio. Then he went to a small men’s store on Central and bought a dark-blue suit with a deep-brown shirt and a yellow tie and black shoes.

“That the way you used to dress when you was a playah, Mr. Grey?” Robyn had asked him while he stood before the store’s triple dressing mirror.

“No, baby. That’s Coydog McCann I see in the mirror—the classiest man I evah knew.”

After donning his new clothes Ptolemy took Robyn to the ladies’ shop next door, and then to the taxi stand on Normandie. From there they went to Niecie’s home.

“Hey, Niecie,” the old man said in a tone he hadn’t known for decades. “How you doin’, sugah?”

Niecie stopped there in the desolate living room, cocking her head to try and get a bead on the voice she was hearing.

“I’m all bettah now, Niecie,” Ptolemy said. “Robyn done took me to a doctor near about killed me, but then he pulled me back from the night.”

“You can, you can think bettah now, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked, stumbling on her own tongue. “Like when you was young?”

“Mmmm,” Ptolemy said, smiling and nodding. “But I’m still old in my bones, so you gonna offah me a seat?”

After Robyn got the lemonade from the kitchen, big-bodied Hilliard came back from a run to the store with Letisha and Arthur in tow. The big thief frowned when he saw Ptolemy sitting there with his legs crossed and a glass of lemonade in his hand.

“Boy,” Ptolemy greeted. He wasn’t mad at the young man anymore.

“Name’s Hilly, not boy .”

“Hilliard, you will speak respectfully to elders in my house,” his mother said.

Hilliard glowered.

“Why you wouldn’t let me in your house when I come all the way ovah there to see about you, Papa Grey?”

“You know why.”

“’Cause you old an’, an’, an’ senile.”

“Hilliard!” Niecie said.

“It’s true.”

“Maybe I was a little forgetful,” Ptolemy admitted, “but I could still count up to three with the best of ’em.”

“You see, Mama? He talks crazy.”

The angry young man’s tone was aggressive. Robyn put her hand in her purse as Ptolemy smiled. The children huddled next to their auntie Niecie’s chair, staring at Hilly as if he were some dangerous stranger.

“I ain’t so crazy I don’t know how to make you listen,” Ptolemy said.

He put his hand inside his breast pocket and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

The sight of money hit Hilly like a slap.

“What’s that, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked.

“Yo’ boy took me to the bank with three checks, got my signature, but only gave me money for the one,” Ptolemy said. “That’s why he blusterin’, ’cause he feel guilty. But I had Robyn bring me ovah here to bury the hatchet.”

He leaned over, handing the roll of cash to his grandniece.

“That’s six hunnert dollahs, Niecie. I wanna make sure that these kids is gettin’ what they need. I’ma give you sumpin’ like that ev’ry mont’. Lucky I didn’t give yo’ son my passbook or I might not have nuthin’ left ta give ya.”

“My boy does not steal,” Niecie said, clutching the wad in her lap. “You gettin’ old, Pitypapa. You just made a mistake thinkin’ you give him three checks but it was only one.”

Ptolemy noticed then that she was wearing a maroon dress with pink flowers stitched into it. It was faded and worn.

“Madeline Richards made that dress for you, didn’t she?” Ptolemy asked.

Robyn grinned when she saw the surprise on her one-time guardian’s face.

“How did you know that?”

“Sensie introduced you to Maddie. An’ Maddie made clothes for a livin’. She always was partial to flower patterns, an’ when she couldn’t find no cloth with a flower she sewed some on.”

“I remember meetin’ Maddie,” Niecie said. “She made this dress maybe fifteen years ago.”

“When you was a li’l girl your uncle Roger called you Betty Boop because you loved to watch that cartoon on the TV. If you’d sing her boop-boop-pe-doop song he’d give you two nickels.”

Hilda “Niecie” Brown frowned and cocked her head again. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and after a moment or two she nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s right. Uncle Roger. He died in Vietnam and I cried for what felt like a whole week. He wasn’t really my uncle, though.”

“That’s what yo’ mama said, but he was her brother usin’ another name because he had killed a man in Alabama and then took on another man’s identity. He died under a false name. He really was your uncle, but nobody said it so that he didn’t get put on a Alabama chain gang.”

“You remembah all that, Pitypapa?”

“Doctor cured me, baby,” Ptolemy said as he rose to his feet.

Robyn stood behind him, her hand still in her purse, her eye on Hilliard.

“He opened my mind all the way back to the first day I could remembah as a child. I can think so clear that I could almost remembah what my father’s father was thinkin’ the day he conceived my old man. So you could say what you will but that boy there’s a thief an’ if you don’t tell him sumpin’ he gonna go the way that Roger would’a gone if anybody evah breathed his real name.”

Robyn kept her eyes on Hilly while Niecie stared at her uncle, looking for the man she’d seen little more than a month before.

When she didn’t speak, Ptolemy addressed her again: “I’ma give you that six hunnert dollahs for these kids here ev’ry month. As long as they with you I’ma give it to ’em, but I won’t if you send ’em back to they mama.”

Ptolemy gazed down at the children and they cowered. The boy scrunched up his dark face, trying to understand what the money had to do with him and his sister.

“They wit’ me,” Niecie said, and Ptolemy nodded.

He then turned to the brutish boy. “Hilly, you saved me from that crazy woman and so I forgive you. I’ma call on you sometime soon ’cause I need to know somethin’.”

“What you wanna know from me?”

“Later.”

Ptolemy touched Robyn’s shoulder and they walked out the door and away from the house, moving slowly, like royalty surveying the plight of the poor.

“Why you wanna get Hilly all mad, Uncle?” Robyn said on the bus ride home.

She was wearing the yellow dress that he’d bought her at the women’s clothes store. He knew it was wrong, that the dress reminded him of the day he met Sensia Howard, but he couldn’t stop himself—he loved both women so.

“Yellow’s my favorite color,” he’d told her, “and you my favorite girl.”

But on the bus he just nodded and said, “I need a inroad.”

“What you mean, Uncle Grey?”

“The men just come to you, don’t they, girl?” he asked instead of answering her question directly.

“Huh?”

“Men,” he repeated. “They just come to you—on the street, in the bus, at the movies. They all wanna know you, want you to smile at ’em.”