2
In the evenings Delvin would read to Mr. Oliver. The mortician had come on him in his study lying on the green leather couch scrutinizing a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He barked at him to take his feet off the leather, then asked what he was studying.
“I can’t make all of it out,” Delvin said, “but I think I get the draw of it.”
“Which one you reading, boy?”
“This is one called Macbeth. It’s about a greedy Scotsman.”
“That is a mighty tale,” Oliver said, though he was unfamiliar with it. He owned the volume as he owned most of his books: because they gave him a feeling of substance. “Maybe we can study that one out together,” he said.
Delvin liked the idea.
They began sessions at night after work was done for the day, or when there was freedom from it. People died at all hours of the day and night. Oliver and his crew had to be prepared to go forth to retrieve the deceased, ready to rise in the wee-est hours to open his house to the dead. The deceased crossed his threshold on stretchers, on doors, on planks and carried in blankets or pulled down from the backs of horses or from the beds of trucks or hauled by hand between weeping, teeth-gnashing grievers, once on the broad iron gate that opened onto the farm of Mr. Wendell Comer, whose only son had been kicked in the head by a mule. Mostly these days they came by ambulance from the hospitals and the morgue. Or he went to fetch them, rising to his midnight errand, a heroic figure, as he saw it, civilization’s appointed guide, liaison between the two worlds, navigator and helmsman for the journey to the terrible (and beautiful) mysteries. Oliver had several assistants now, both in the prep room and upstairs in the viewing parlors. He himself was a minister, minister enough, and sometimes performed funeral services in the old dining room that had been converted to a chapel. The boy got into everything, but he hardly learned about anything. Oliver figured the trade—hoped the trade—the seep of it, would infuse him. His dream of finding an heir had settled on the boy—for now.
Both of them enjoyed the reading sessions. They read stories of French kings and stories of explorers and dudes in fancy clothes, but the stories they liked best were the stories in the Shakespeare plays. Propped together on his great bed, Oliver in his wine-red silk dressing gown, Delvin in his green cotton robe and blue pajamas with smiling caucasian faces printed on them, the boy did his best each session to get through a few pages of one of the plays. They made it all the way through Macbeth without either of them understanding half of what the boy read; it made them both feel as if they were getting somewhere in life. Delvin was good at saying the words but they were both poor at figuring out what they meant. They got the gist however, or the draw as the boy called it. He had plenty of words Oliver had never heard, probably words that would encourage Mr. Shakespeare himself. “That man had a rowdy life,” Delvin said, speaking of the Scottish murderer. “Like a tiger,” Oliver concurred. They shuddered and looked off in separate directions, Delvin studying the flame of the squat red candle on the old desk and Oliver looking at the boy’s reflection in the window glass. He shuddered again.
“I would like to meet a woman like that Mrs. Mac B,” Delvin said.
“Naw you wouldn’t, boy.”
“How come you hadn’t married?” he wanted to know.
“Lots of reasons.”
“Name one.”
“Not that many care to marry an undertaker.”
“Scared, hunh?”
“Mortified mostly.”
“What else?”
“I’m busy and don’t have that much time to meet them.”
“Seems like you’d get first dibs on the widers.”
Oliver laughed. “Does, dudn’t it?”
“I can help you meet women.”
“How is that?”
“I can scout em out for you.”
“Don’t you be doing that, boy.”
“Okay.” Delvin snickered. “I won’t.”
Unless I just have to, he thought, exercising his form of honesty in the situation.
He had already begun to keep an eye peeled for likely marital candidates. He studied the mourners come to view the bodies of their loved ones. The better families preferred to have the remains brought to the house. Some liked to have Mr. Oliver there on the premises with the loved one, others didn’t want him anywhere around. For a rich man he had to be awfully humble, Delvin thought. That would not be his road to riches. He would—he didn’t know what he he would do. Lately he’d been feeling restless. Some boys he met in the alley behind the mortuary told him they were riding freights all over the place.
“For fun?” he had asked.
“No, you little fool,” one of them, Portly Sanders, a boy he remembered, or thought he did, from his old Jim’s Gully neighborhood, said. “We looking for work.”
“I got enough of that right here,” Delvin said.
“Bunch of ghouls,” Sammy Brakes said.
Delvin had not seen his sweaty face before. “What’s that word?” he asked.
“You know,” Sammy said, “the ones who dig around in graves.”
“We don’t dig in the grave. We fill the grave.”
A breeze caught in the tops of the bamboo hedge and passed on. He wanted to hit this Sammy with the greasy, pockmarked face, but he held back. He turned quickly, spinning almost, his arms flying free, and staggered away in mock fright. The other boys laughed.
“Gon miss your train,” Delvin said, laughing, and skipped through the wire gate into the backyard where the boys, superstitious and afraid of legal trouble, wouldn’t follow him. He waved at them before he went into the house.
Just this week he had been disciplined for fighting with the kitchen boy. The boy had called him a dumb bastard child. Delvin had knocked him into the kindling box. The boy had cut the back of his head on a piece of fat lighter wood. Sunny was his name, but the boy was anything but. Delvin couldn’t stand him and would have fought him until he was nothing but another customer for the establishment, but he didn’t want to lose his place. Oliver had made him work in the garden spreading horse manure and then working it into the black-eyed pea and tomato rows. From the kitchen window Sunny had eyed him evilly, ducking behind the red cheesecloth curtain whenever Delvin caught him looking. The punishment made him restless, or added to his restlessness, but he didn’t want to hit the road, he told himself—if he was going to—before he found a bride for Mr. Oliver. He hung around the viewing rooms, wearing the cut-down black suit (once belonging to another favored boy) that Mr. O had provided for him when he rode in the hearse.
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.”
“There aint no subject, boy,” Mr. O said and laughed his wheezy, pressurized laugh.
They stood a moment looking up at the fuzzy January stars. Orion’s lantern, the Sisters’ broken stroke aimed at the distant iron mountains.
Delvin went ahead with his note plan, writing in florid ink strokes a message first worked out on a scrap of butcher paper. I was most grateful to be of service. . . . Would you care to share a cup of tea at the Little Hummingbird cafe over on Jefferson street? If so, please . . . by return . . . yours . . . Delvin wanted to make sure Mr. O would have to go. Of course he’d be angry but he’d get over that.
Delvin decided to write another set of letters detailing Mr. Oliver’s good qualities. I tell interesting stories, am not stingy with the pocket money, have never been a finicky eater, relish sitting out on the side porch reading good books, am a devotee of worksaving appliances, take no more than a ceremonial sip of wine (no spirits) and act gentlemanly at all times—and I have good table manners and can be counted on in a pinch . . .
“That is a fine piece of work,” Delvin said to himself as he folded the prepared sheets into envelopes he’d lifted from the bunch tucked in one of the cubbyholes in Mr. O’s big secretary desk.
Replies to the invites came quickly. Both ladies said they would be delighted to join Mr. Oliver for tea. Delvin was able to determine the exact moment when the funeral director received the first answer. This by way of the loudly exclaimed cry, “What the goddamn hell!”
He also heard Mr. O tell Polly to go fetch him.
He ran out the kitchen door, through the back gate and out into the alley where Willie Burt was washing the old Crane & Breed glass-sided hearse they kept for those few who still preferred the departed to be carried to the cemetery by horse pull. The horses were in a little four-stall barn down the alley. Delvin liked to go out there and sit near their stalls. He didn’t particularly like horses but he liked the smell of the hay. He went down there now and pulled himself up on a pile of stacked bales. He pulled the little green volume of Othello out of his jacket pocket, leaned back against a bale and began to read. Iago was busy with his underhanded ways. They were nothing to what he, Delvin Walker, former child pretender to the throne of France, was up to. But maybe he shouldn’t have done what he did. Lord, I got to slow down. He had already been in one fight that morning. With a high school boy who had caught him the other day whistling at his little plump girlfriend over on Stockton street. Roscoe Blake his name was, a portly fellow with an incipient hump. Roscoe had slapped him in the face. Delvin had fallen back into the manure pile—right behind this barn. He’d got up and hit Roscoe with two chunks of crumbly manure. Roscoe came at him windmilling both fists. Delvin was amazed at how silly he looked. He ducked and poked him tentatively in the belly. Roscoe went down as if he had hit him with a bat. He rolled over three times—like he was going to roll on down the alley, Delvin thought—but then he got up. He shook his fist at Delvin and shouted that he had better leave Preeny alone or worse was coming. “Hadn’t seemed too bad so far,” Delvin said. Roscoe had walked off stiff-legged like a dog down the alley toward the bicycle he rode everywhere. He was a pretty boy and always had money.
But this episode wasn’t troubling him at the moment. I feel burdened by life, Delvin thought. He missed his mother. These days he only thought of her when he said his prayers at night. “Bless Mama,” he said as he knelt beside the bed, as he had been taught at the foundling home and required to do. Those two words were all he said. Each night they floated away on a puff of breath to where he didn’t know. No one, as far as he knew, had heard news of her. He’d better go over to the Emporium again to check if anybody over there had received word from her, or about her.
Just then, Elmer, resettling the brimless cap he never took off, arrived to say he was wanted back at the house.
“Did you tell em you saw me?”
“I didn’t see no harm in it.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Elmer, who had disliked Delvin on sight, laughed.
“You go on,” Delvin said.
“Some’s got real work to do.”
“When you run across one you might ask him for a few pointers.” Elmer blew air through his fat lips, turned and sloped out of the barn. Delvin waited until he was fully out of sight and sound and then he waited a few minutes longer before he started to the house.