Because Grandma worked in Monsignor McCarthy’s office, I was fortunate to be able to attend Saint Scholastica School for a third the usual tuition, and the nuns who ran it were tough ladies. If anyone could teach Harmon a lesson he’d never forget, it was Sister Agnes or Sister Catherine.
I said, “You won’t tell them, will you?”
“Well, I really should. And I should tell your grandpa.”
Grandpa’s father had been a barber, and Grandpa’s mother had been a beautician, and they had run their house according to a long set of rules. When their children occasionally decided that those rules were really nothing more than suggestions, my great-grandfather demonstrated a second use for the strap of leather that he used to strop his straight razors. Grandpa Teddy didn’t resort to corporal punishment, as his father did, but his look of extreme disappointment stung bad enough.
“I won’t tell them,” my mother said, “because you’re such a good kid. You’ve built up a lot of credit at the First Bank of Mom.”
After she kissed my forehead and got up, we went into her room to continue packing. The apartment came furnished, and it included a bedroom vanity with a three-part mirror. She trusted me to take everything out of the many little drawers and put all of it in this small square carrier that she called a train case, while she packed her clothes in two large suitcases and three shopping bags.
She wasn’t finished explaining why we had to move. I realized many years later that she always felt she had to justify herself to me. She never did need to do that, because I always knew her heart, how good it was, and I loved her so much that sometimes it hurt when I’d lie awake at night worrying about her.
Anyway, she said, “Honey, don’t you ever get to thinking that one kind of people is better than another kind. Harmon Jessup is rich compared to me, but he’s poor compared to William Murkett.”
In addition to owning the glitzy nightclub where she’d been offered five nights a week, Murkett had several other enterprises.
“Harmon is black,” she continued, “Murkett is white. Harmon had nearly no school. Murkett went to some upper-crust university. Harmon is a dirty old tomcat and proud of it. Murkett, he’s married with kids of his own and he’s got a good reputation. But under all those differences, there’s no difference. They’re the same. Each of them is just half a man. Don’t you ever be just half a man, Jonah.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t be.”
“You be true to people.”
“I will.”
“You’ll be tempted.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. Everyone is.”
“You aren’t,” I said.
“I was. I am.”
She finished packing, and I said, “I guess then you don’t have a job, that’s why we’re going to Grandpa’s.”
“I’ve still got Woolworth’s, baby.”
I knew there were times when she cried, but she never did in front of me. Right then, her eyes were as clear and direct and as certain as Sister Agnes’s eyes. In fact, she was a lot like Sister Agnes, except that Sister Agnes couldn’t sing a note and my mom was way prettier.
She said, “I’ve got Woolworth’s and a good voice and time. And I’ve got you. I’ve got everything I need.”
I thought of my father then, how he kept leaving us, how we wouldn’t have been in that fix if he’d kept even half his promises, but I couldn’t vent. My mom had never dealt out as much punishment as the one time I said that I hated him, and though I didn’t think I should be ashamed for having said it, I was ashamed just the same.
The day would come when despising him would be the least of it, when he would flat-out terrify me.
We had no sooner finished packing than the doorbell rang, and it was Grandpa Teddy, come to take us home with him.
4
The first time my mother’s life fell apart was when she found out that she was pregnant with me. She’d been accepted into the music program at Oberlin, and she had nearly a full scholarship; but before she could even start her first year, she learned I was on the way. She said she really didn’t want to go to Oberlin, that it was her parents’ idea, that she wanted to fly on what talent she had, not on a lot of music theory that might stifle her. She wanted instead to work her way from one dinky club to another less dinky and steadily up, up, up, getting experience. She claimed I came along just in time to save her from Oberlin, and maybe I believed that when I was a kid.