The Perishing, page 16
Anymore.
LOU, 1931
Her name is Leticia Thomas, and this is her house. Her husband passed on three months ago. I read the details of his death before I came. I’m sure I just walked over the spot on her porch where her husband went—the third step. There were handprints across his face, but the official report was heart failure caused by a lung condition.
Mrs. Thomas has no grass for a lawn. Instead, it’s planted with palm trees and yuccas, orange trees and jacarandas. A tropical paradise that prompted W. E. B. Dubois, during his tour of Los Angeles a few years ago, to say that Black Angelenos were “without a doubt the most beautifully housed group of colored people in the United States.” But her house is not like the other houses off Central—palatial bungalows and Spanish-style stuccos. Her Craftsman is not made of wood. It’s mostly brick. The windows along the side of her house seem older than the house, reused from some place that was burned down or demolished. I knock on her front door and wait.
No answer.
I knock again.
Nothing.
I walk along the left side of the house next to the driveway, knocking on those windows, in case she forgot I was coming and can’t hear the bell. We had an appointment. Ten thirty, and most people are up and out and back home again. “Mrs. Thomas? It’s Louise from the L.A. Times.”
A beautiful garden of white flowers blooms near my feet, in a square where the concrete was carved out and potted with soil. The white heads of the flowers are tilted up with mouths open, waiting on rain. “Mrs. Thomas?” I say, going to the next window, knocking on glass. “Mrs. Thomas?”
“I’m glad you’re here,” a woman says from the far end of the drive, behind a wood paneled gate, tall enough that only the crown of her head shows. I go to her and she wiggles the latch, struggling a little to get it open. I put my purse over my shoulder and grab the top of the gate and pull. No use. “Our appointment was for eight,” she says.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I say, and stagger my legs to give myself more power. She pushes, I pull. “I was told ten thirty. We can reschedule if another time would work better?”
She pushes her body into the gate, and with a hard shove the gate comes undone. “Come on in,” she says with a smile. “No better time than now. Can I get you a cup of tea or a pill to relax you? Or coffee?” She waves me in. “It’s kindness to keep a pill or warm brew for friends and company.” She stands to the side so I can come through the gate.
I follow behind her as she weaves a path through her thigh-high grass. “Your home is lovely, Mrs. Thomas.”
“Leticia,” she says, and points to the far back of her yard. “My husband built the garage.” A pile of nicely stacked bricks is hidden in thin reeds and from it she picks up a small, scooped trowel. Next to it wet mortar is drying in a gray clump.
“I’m sorry to hear about your husband’s passing,” I say.
“I’m just glad the Times is interested in David’s life. He lived a good one.”
“Resting in heaven now,” I say.
She turns, corrects me. “He’s all around us.” She picks up a piece of timber and throws it to the side of the path. I cover my mouth as we make our way to her back door, our movement agitating wispy insects.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Is it whether I believe in God?” she says. “Because I didn’t say he went to heaven? Was it right to assume I’m Christian because I’m Black? Is that what you were about to ask?”
“Not if the question offends you.”
“If you’re talking about a god who hates the poor, immigrants, and homosexuals and gives less preference to Blacks, Mexicans, and women, then I’m atheist. I don’t know that god and I certainly don’t believe in him.”
I want to ask her more about it, but I don’t. This interview’s not about my personal questions. It’s an excavation of her husband. I follow her to her back door.
The foundation of her house is earthquake broken, like my office. It’s raised, so it’s much higher than her yard. Mrs. Thomas has to reach up to turn the doorknob to open it. We step up toward a tiled kitchen, but she stumbles, scrapes her knee on the jagged edge of the step. The step is red. It’s been bled on before. I reach for her.
She holds up her hand. “I’m fine. Do it all the time,” she says, brushing off her knees and the dust there, strangely uninjured.
Assorted buckets and sponges are in the way and she pushes them over with her foot. Rags lie on the floor and are hung over the countertops. “Excuse my mess,” she says. But I don’t see mess. I see beauty. Murals and mosaics are completed on the kitchen wall and tiles are affixed everywhere—floors included—but most jobs here are in process. The wall behind the kitchen table is only partly done—blue and white and yellow and green mosaics, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle glued to the wall.
“Some think I’ve got too much,” she says.
“No … no, it’s nice,” I say, and look around the room. No wall is untouched by ceramic. There’s a section of blue tile on the back wall. An image is painted on it. A green field and poppies, behind it a castle on a hill.
“Ah, that castle,” she says. “You like it? Castles are defenders. They take care of the people inside their walls.”
“Beautiful,” I say.
A partly eaten sandwich and today’s newspaper on the table. A cup of cold tea contains a thin skin of milk lying like a continent on the surface. There’s mail on the table too. It’s a lived-in work site.
I touch the tiles behind the table. The mosaics are saturated with color.
“It’s a Californian invention to put tile everywhere,” she says. “My husband preferred the textured matte glazes of Ernest Batchelder. But I like the brilliance and balance of the ones you’re looking at. Malibu Pottery’s my favorite.”
I take out my notepad and set it down on the table to look in my purse for a pencil. She gives me hers. “I’ve got a million of ’em.” She asks me to hold a paper-size sheet of plywood against the wall like a shelf. She wants to use the edge to level a tile so it’s straight. She places a new yellow mosaic on the wall, no spacer. She eyes the distance between the last two and this new one to keep them equal. “The tile boom created more than a hundred tile factories in L.A. California took the nation by storm. My husband was on the first wave.”
From a bucket under the table, she uses her trowel to spoon wet mortar, lumpy and gray like discolored pancake batter, and spreads some on the wall and a bit on the back of her tiny tile.
She picks up a rubber mallet from the floor. “The mines,” she says, “are what triggered his bouts with breathing. Inflamed airways and all the mucus. I suspect there’s something in those clay deposits. Or in the tiles he cut at the factory for fifteen years.”
A little mortar drips on the floor.
“You don’t want to use too much of this stuff. It’ll bubble up around all four sides of your tile and you’ll have to clean it out or else when you add your final touches, the grout in the spaces will look terrible. Excess mortar’s easy to clean out when you have just a few tiles, but with a hundred and twenty? I’m not that patient.”
She takes the plywood sheet from my hand and lays it over the yellow mosaic; she taps the ply with the rubber mallet, flattening the mosaics underneath. She lifts the wood away. With a small wedge tool from the table, she cleans the mortar from the four sides she’d put up before I came but leaves what’s oozing up from her new one. “It’s better to let it harden first before you clean out the cracks and joints. Hardened but not dry.” She reaches out her hand for another tile. I take one from the narrow box on the table. “Blue,” she says.
She lays her cheek on the wall and closes one eye, trying to see better across its surface. She rubs her palm over a patch of wall like she’s brushing off dust.
“So there’s not a god who’s angry at us?” I say, finally asking the question I wanted to before.
“Yes. No. Maybe. Imagine God’s a violin maker and we’re the players who have choice, and now she’s watching us use her lovely creations as tennis rackets. Whatever that feeling would be. Hand me another tile.” I do. Then I return to the box, captivated by an image.
Next to the box, a framed photo lies face up. Leticia’s in the image, a few years younger, standing in front of a makeshift nurses’ tent. Military. A red cross is on her uniform. “Turkey 1917” is handwritten in black at the bottom center of the photo. There are four other Black women nurses with her, a radio resting on the table next to them.
“You were in the war?” I say. My voice rises with excitement in knowing we were there. Black women.
“Stationed in the eastern part,” she says. “Americans were associated powers supporting France, the British Empire. Russia.”
“Allies?” I say.
“Not allies,” she says. “We were avoiding foreign entanglements, is what they told us. Our support was loose,” she says. “I was sent with the nurses. Came home and Los Angeles still won’t allow the county hospital to train Negro nurses.”
I pick out a yellow tile and give it to her.
“Then what’s the radio for? And the second one in the photo, the one under the table?”
She leans back and considers the photo. “Would you look at that?” she says. “Double duty. Nurse and a pattern finder. Sometimes a code breaker. Sometimes just listened to conversations over airwaves.”
“What were the messages like?”
“They taught me. They taught me that when you can recognize a pattern, you can change an outcome. Change a pattern in your own life, you change your whole life. But I tell you the truth, the only pattern worth repeating is kindness.”
I wish I could just listen to her talk, unguided and unhindered by my questions. But I need to write about her husband. “Have you always lived in this house?” I say.
“We started in a car in L.A. after Kentucky. Homeless for six months, when all we had was love,” she says. “My husband used to say we could all love harder. Till love was all gone, he said. As if gone were possible.”
“That’s sweet,” I say.
“He was,” she smiles. “And then the tile came. A perfect fit for an artist at heart. His art could make money. But then the war came.”
“And he went?”
“I did,” she says.
She holds the plywood up against the wall herself. Tilts it straight. Takes the pencil from behind her ear and draws a bottom line between two lines of tiles that will meet in the middle.
“Did they treat you poorly over there?” I ask. “For being Black?”
She pushes a yellow tile into the tiny space. It clicks in. The fit is too tight. She flicks it out and starts sanding down the corner of the tiles that are already hung on each side. “It was the bloodiest war in history,” she says. “A million people died in less than 150 days. It wasn’t just the deaths that exceeded anything people had ever seen before. It was the first time certain weapons were ever used: machine guns, tanks, poison gas. The injuries were brutal and new. We didn’t know how to treat them. By the end of the war, twice as many soldiers were injured as were killed. An unprecedented scale. Unprecedented severity. So, no. It didn’t matter my skin color. I couldn’t let it matter. People I saw were hurting, I was a nurse and couldn’t let how others behaved affect how I treated them. Even the cruel ones, I treated with—”
“Mercy?”
“Not mercy. Respect,” she says. “Compassion,” she says. “Mercy assumes you have power. Something you can decide to give or not. Compassion is kind anyway. What we saw humbled us. There were things we couldn’t treat if we tried. Shell shock, for one. The nightmares soldiers had, their terror, outbursts. The new treatment—electromagnetic therapy—didn’t work.”
“I know somebody who had that,” I say. “She’s better.”
“Better how?” she says, reaching for a tile in the box next to her.
“How?” I say, thinking more about it. “Well, she hasn’t harmed herself. Not even after she lost the third baby to miscarriage.”
“Three babies?” she says, pushing the tile back into the space. “Sadness can be the hardest thing to let go of when there are no visible scars. Scars are the only proof a person has to show that something went terribly wrong.”
She shifts the tile in the space, straightening it.
“What was the weather like in Europe?” I say.
“Europe’s a big place,” she says.
“I always wanted to travel out of the country and eat, see the sights, take it all in. What’s the thing you remember most?”
“That people died,” she says.
We’re both quiet now.
A blue tile falls off the wall. I pick it up and its corner is chipped. She fingers the tiles in the box and finds a new blue square. Blue again, not yellow or white. I can see it now—the pattern on the wall that first seemed random. I pick up the pencil from on the table and hold it out to her. “I see a lot of death at the paper.”
“I saw a lot of murder,” she says. “For borders, politics, race.” She searches through the box of tiles. “But no one thinks herself a bigot,” she says. “It’s 1931, and even now, with all of the race separation by neighborhoods, jobs, marriage and churches, with police, no one will see herself a bigot. She’ll simply point to someone more bigoted than she is and say, ‘See, there’s a bigot.’”
Leticia brings a new blue tile close to her eye. She spreads mortar on the back.
“What are you afraid of?” I say.
“I’m afraid to grow old,” she says. “My body will go. My mind. My husband’s family will come here to stare at my empty husk, listening for the health of my sentences. I’d rather get it over with. Move on so the universe can reuse me the way it reuses everything and let me live again some other way.”
“Again?” I say.
“It’s impossible not to.” She presses her blue tile on the wall without the help of a drawn line. It is perfection.
TWENTY-ONE
LOU, 1932
Esther only wrote me three times in eight months and her Christmas card hardly counted, since she only signed her name to something Hallmark could have written. But I won’t ruin our reunion with it. She’ll be here in an hour, and when she walks in I want her to breathe in the warmth of melted brown sugar, vanilla, and butter and feel covered in caramel, not complaints.
I haven’t slept right for three nights waiting for her. I watched the sunrise again this morning, holding her incomplete letters in my hand—she couldn’t say it all—but I hope her conclusion about Europe is she hated it.
In her last letter, in January, she sent me newspaper clippings from Germany and said she quit drinking on account of her puffy face; the article featured her mug to prove her condition. She drew an arrow to her swollen cheeks then wrote Horror in Großstadtschmetterling.
Her new show was getting all the buzz. The article read Pavement Butterfly: Silent Film Turned Stage Play. Esther Lee as Mah is an actress of transcendent talent and great beauty. I already knew that.
I shopped for a gift for Esther, a dress with pockets. She likes pockets. Cleaned this apartment and recleaned. Got my pie crusts in the oven, open the kitchen window to let the heat out but outside feels as hot as inside. March and ninety degrees is perfect weather for a reunion party and a barbecue.
Down below, Sunday drivers take their time along the usually busy two-lane, ditching church for sunshine with nowhere to go because every business is “Closed Sunday.”
I put my hands in the flour mixture and swear I hear the distinct sound of Esther’s car, too early. Mr. Lee said her flight wasn’t to land till three.
I look outside my window. Nothing. No, louder now. Must be about a block up the street, gears screeching, engine revving, grinding, and crumbling like it’s about to fall out.
Esther’s car rolls into view. That can’t be her. It’s slow, like the end of a carnival ride, the power shut off, rolling to a stop curbside. Smoke rises from the car’s undercarriage.
I wait in the window to see who’s getting out of the car. The waft of the burning clutch tumbles up and in.
It’s her red lipstick I see first.
I stumble out of the kitchen with my fingers covered in flour, white handprints explode and chase me to the door—a bomb where I held the counter, held the wall, the table. I wipe my hands on myself to get to the door—a grenade.
I scramble down my steps and she sees me. Wordless, we serve each other hugs while an unexpected rain falls from the blue, unclouded sky, and it occurs to me how odd it is that water can develop from air, untethered from a rock or spigot, and fall like magic, the air raining on us. This moment is magic.
“Have you heard about the Lindbergh baby?!” she says, like we haven’t missed a conversation or day together.
“Isn’t it wild!”
Somebody gets out of her passenger door. “You know my sister Melanie,” Esther says. They look alike, but the face is a limited palette. “Well, come on,” she tells her. “Let’s get out of this rain.”
Esther and I rush up the stairs into my apartment. She plucks her wet hair dry with her fingertips, throws off her coat, makes a beeline to my kitchen. “How do I turn on your radio!” She flips it on. “They say it was a burglary gone wrong,” she says. “You think it was a burglary? Or you think that Lindbergh man is hiding the baby for publicity? It’s horrible is what. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to white babies.” She pauses. “What are you wearing?”
I tie my big apron tighter and straighten my dust cap.
“Are you baking?”
My front door opens, and Melanie is standing there, almost forgotten already. Esther keeps tuning the radio through whirs.
“Melanie?” I say, then choose my words carefully so they are slow and clear and understandable. “Esther’s said in her letters that you’ve been in China.”
A puzzled expression flashes across her face.
“How did you enjoy your time there?”
