Without Prejudice Read online

  To his surprise, Duval shook his head emphatically. ‘No, sir. I don’t need a loan.’ He paused, then said, ‘I’m pretty good with my hands – and I like carpentry. Fixing things, that’s what I like to do. But I can’t get into the union.’

  ‘I see,’ said Robert, wondering what opportunities had been afforded by the state facilities in Joliet or Dixon. If the showers leaked, did they call in an inmate? If the governor’s desk wobbled, would the likes of Duval put a wood chock under its creaky leg?

  ‘So if you know anybody who was to need a handyman, that would be something I could do.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Robert, using an Americanism no longer natural to him, ‘let me think.’ He was trying to buy time. He said, sounding lame even to himself, ‘If I hear of anything I’ll let you know. Have you got a number where I can reach you?’

  ‘You could call me at Jermaine’s,’ said Duval. He had demolished his pie; only a teardrop of ice cream remained on the plate.

  ‘No cell phone?’

  ‘Not yet.’ He smiled weakly. ‘They kind of expensive.’

  ‘Right.’ Robert looked down at his cup, trying to look thoughtful, then made a show of looking at his watch. ‘Duval, I’m going to have to get back to work now.’ He wanted to say. ‘You know how it is,’ but doubted that Duval would. Robert felt surrounded by a minefield of language he didn’t feel he should use.

  Duval nodded a little sadly. ‘Of course,’ he said. He started to reach into his jacket and Robert realised he was going for his wallet.

  ‘No, this is on me. Next time you can pick up the tab.’

  ‘Okay.’ Duval’s pride seemed salved.

  Robert got up, leaving six bucks on the table, and together they left the coffee shop. In the building’s foyer Robert stopped and pointed down a side corridor. ‘I’m going that way.’ He held out his hand. ‘Let’s keep in touch,’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Robert walked away quickly. He felt relieved. It had gone well – or at least not badly. He was glad that he’d done the decent thing, but he felt it wasn’t likely he would see Duval again – which was a relief.

  Then he heard Duval call out behind him. ‘Bobby,’ he said, and for a moment Robert wondered if he’d left something behind.

  Duval was standing in the corridor, one arm extended with his finger pointing at Robert, almost accusingly. There was a strained look on his face that hadn’t been there before. ‘There’s something I want you to know.’

  Robert felt his earlier apprehension return. ‘What’s that, Duval?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  At least that’s what it sounded like. ‘What did you say?’ Robert demanded.

  Duval shook his head. He seemed suddenly possessed by an angry righteousness; there was nothing passive about him now. He stood, still pointing his finger at Robert. ‘I said, I didn’t do it.’ Then he brought his hand down and walked away.

  Astonished, Robert stared at the retreating figure, trying to take this in. The matter-of-factness: I didn’t do it.

  Said so many years ago about something else. The same denial. And now, after twenty-four years in a man-made hellhole, he was saying the same thing again. I didn’t do it.

  IV

  HE HAD KEPT the light off and the door half-closed, thinking this would hide his presence in the pantry. Then a voice came from outside the door, light and laughing.

  ‘I hear me a little rat in there. Well, the little rat better understand that I’m going back to the linen closet and when I come back here the little rat better be out of there or it’s going to find its tail in a trap.’

  He heard Vanetta move down the hall and he came out with three cherries in his hand, pilfered from a plastic carton in the freezer. He popped them quickly into his mouth.

  They were so cold they burned the insides of his cheeks. Slowly warming in his mouth, through the ache they brought to his jaw, he tasted their dense and icy sweetness. He had just finished them when Vanetta reappeared. The ironing board was up next to the stove, with a stack of laundry waiting for her. She spread out one of his father’s shirts, hooking the collar over the board’s narrowed nose, and picked up the iron, saying softly, ‘I hope you left some in the carton, Bobby.’ She was only half-smiling. ‘Your daddy’s got people for dinner on Saturday and Merrill wants to serve those with some ice cream.’

  ‘There’re lots left, Vanetta,’ he said, avoiding the issue of whether he had taken any, though they both knew he had.

  It was January and they were in the kitchen, Bobby at the rickety table with his homework. Outside the wind was blowing new snow into the back alleyway. Mike D’Amico had come up the outside stairs in back with the vegetable delivery, and when Vanetta held the door open for him cold air had overwhelmed even the warmth from the stove.

  His father had taken a freezer locker in Fennville, where he’d stored the cut-up half-steer he’d bought on the advice of his friend, the county agent, along with several lugs of fruit. Cherries, of course – it was cherry country – but also sliced strawberries, raspberries, and sliced peaches and plums frozen in syrup. On a weekend trip north that autumn they had collected fruit, put it in plastic cartons, and brought it down in a cool box to deposit it here, in the South Side freezer.

  Fruit meant summer, fruit meant warmth, fruit was a talisman of another place than this large, dark apartment on the South Side, where Bobby didn’t want to be. He sensed Vanetta didn’t want to be there either. So he would prod her into talking about her own childhood, deep in the Mississippi delta, on her father’s small farm. ‘What did you grow on the farm, Vanetta?’

  He knew the answers, but the shared imagining of her telling took them both out of the dark cold winter of Chicago. She said, ‘Oh, most everything we wanted to eat. There weren’t no store near us – it took two hours to get to town. That was on a horse – we didn’t have no car.

  ‘We grew every kind of vegetable. Beans, and peas, and corn – nice corn – and tomatoes so fat and soft they made your mouth pucker just looking at them. Potatoes too each spring, and sweet potatoes.’ The latter were Vanetta’s favourites.

  ‘And fruit?’ He was never very interested in vegetables.

  ‘We had all sorts of fruit. Strawberries, just bursting with juice, and raspberries too. Not so many cherries – we had one tree but it’s awful hot for them in Mississippi. But come summer there’d be peaches as big as baseballs – there’s nothing better than a good peach pie, especially with home-made ice cream. You had to work so hard making ice cream back then it made it taste extra good.’

  She was chopping cabbage for coleslaw, made with oil and so much vinegar his eyes popped eating it. He loved its sourness.

  ‘Please sit down with me, Vanetta.’

  ‘Let me just finish this, baby.’ When she had she went to the fridge and took out a bottle of Pepsi and a snowball – two coconut-coated balls of rubbery fluff surrounding chocolate cake with a cream centre. She cut one of them in half and put it on a plate before him, then opened the Pepsi and poured a couple of ounces out for him into a plastic cup. Then she sat down at the table, too. Biting into the other half of the snowball, she nodded appreciatively and closed her eyes, dreamlike.

  ‘Hard to believe spring is ever going to show up – but it always does. Only I can’t remember a winter as cold as this. Seems like the snow’s forgot to stop.’ She picked up a deck of playing cards she’d had on the table and started laying out her own, semi-impossible game of solitaire. Bobby hated it because you almost never won. But he liked to watch her play, liked staring at her hands, their rich deep brown with pinkish half-moons around the cuticles. The brown skin meant she was a Negro. He understood that now, and he had laughed like someone in the know when she’d told him about the little boy in another household who’d complained that her skin was always dirty.

  Now he asked, ‘Was there ever snow in Mississippi?’

  ‘Almost never,’ she said. ‘Cotton don’t like snow, so
snow’s not allowed there.’

  He laughed at the ridiculous logic of this and Vanetta laughed too.

  She picked up a card off the table, held it thoughtfully against her mouth for a moment, then put it down at the end of the longest row. ‘You is distracting me, Bobby, so I’m going to lose.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  She laughed again; she was always laughing. ‘Don’t worry, I was going to lose anyway.’ She collected the cards in a pile and sorted them, then put the pack down on the table. Finishing her Pepsi, she stood up. ‘I got supper to make now. You want to help, or you want to go watch TV?’

  ‘What’s for supper?’

  ‘Baked chicken. And rice, and slaw.’

  Of course, it was Friday – his least favourite day because it meant the advent of the weekend when there was no Vanetta. She cooked by an invariable schedule: Monday was pot roast (yuck), Tuesday was ribs with barbecue sauce, Wednesday soy-soaked hamburgers, and Thursday – well, Thursday was pot luck according to his father, which could mean anything, Chinese takeaway if they were lucky, his father’s adored lamb kidneys if they weren’t, which made Bobby want a dog even more than usual, since then he could have slipped the offal to the dog.

  Recently Thursday was even dodgier than the food, because every other week Merrill had taken to coming to supper, and Vanetta would stay late. Then they ate in the dining room, rather than around the kitchen table, and he and Mike had to comb their hair and change their shirts. Merrill wore a dress and usually had a necklace on, which Lily seemed happy to imitate. Merrill would insist on proper conversation, which only his father and Lily seemed to enjoy. They discussed issues with a capital ‘I’ – the worsening situation in Vietnam, Richard Nixon, sometimes (with lowered voices and an eye on the swing door to the kitchen) the growing unrest among the Negro population. The discussion was as formal as school to Bobby, and as dull. Once when Mike made a silly face, Bobby laughed uncontrollably, and his father sent him to his bedroom, where he cried until Vanetta came to say goodnight and slipped him a bacon sandwich in a napkin.

  Now he watched as Vanetta took jointed chicken pieces on a plate and put them two at a time in a paper bag which already held salt-and-peppered flour. She shook them hard in the bag, then dipped each one in a bowl of beaten egg, before laying them carefully in a roasting tin which she then put in the oven. She was wearing a sleeveless sweater and a black skirt; unlike Gladys, she didn’t like to wear an apron, and she refused to wear a uniform.

  When Lily came home (Mike had basketball practice and came home later), Bobby would go back to the bedroom to watch TV or play with his marbles, or use his father’s old putter, stroking a golf ball across the bare brown carpet into a speckled plastic cup that served as the hole. He didn’t mind being alone there, even before Lily got home, as long as he knew Vanetta was in the apartment.

  When he went to the back of the apartment, the door to his father’s bedroom was always open. He kept it that way, ever since Bobby’s mother had died two years before. Even at night his father didn’t close it, so he could hear his children if they needed him. Bobby didn’t want it closed again – it would mean someone else had taken his mother’s place.

  He wondered why Lily acted as if she liked this woman Merrill, unless it was because she really did. Mike loathed her, though in front of their father his antipathy was only evident because he never talked about the woman at all. Oh, Merrill was polite enough and pleasant looking and, according to Vanetta, she dressed nicely, but she made you feel you had to be on your best behaviour, and you couldn’t ever be yourself. His mother had been pretty, girlish and had liked to dance; Merrill was handsome and acted lady-like. She called his father Jonathan, for example, when everybody knew his name was Johnny, and he was different when he was with her – there were not so many jokes. His dad had always been naturally funny, but there was nothing natural to Merrill, and her increasing presence worried Bobby.

  She also tried to tell Vanetta what to do, which wasn’t right at all. Vanetta took it in her stride, he supposed, but he couldn’t believe she liked it. And Lily didn’t help – she was arguing with Vanetta these days, being downright rude, about when she would go out and when she’d see her friends and how much time she could spend on the phone even though she hadn’t done her homework.

  ‘She’s just being a teenager,’ Vanetta had explained to his father, when Lily was giving him a hard time too, but Bobby was apprehensive nonetheless and didn’t like the arguments.

  When Vanetta asked her to do something, Lily would say, ‘Don’t boss me.’

  ‘Child, I’m not asking you anything your father don’t want you to do. If you wants to make a fuss, make it with him.’

  And Lily would roll her eyes and sigh.

  He figured as long as Merrill didn’t actually live there he was safe. He wished instead that Vanetta could live with them. Or at the very least be there more of the time – especially weekends, when there were just the four Danzigers stuck in this dark apartment, especially during winter. They seemed never to go out; the only expedition was on Saturday morning when his father took him (Mike and Lily always turning down the privilege) along for the weekly shop. He said he needed help, but Bobby knew he needed company.

  Yet how could his father be lonely? There didn’t seem any need for his father to see Merrill. He had his children, didn’t he? – and his friends, and Uncle Larry and Aunt ZZ. And Vanetta as the lynchpin for life in this apartment. Yet there was his father finding company with Merrill, some lady who lived in the Cloisters, a vast armoury-shaped apartment building, which Bobby passed each morning with his father on the way to school.

  His father, bizarrely, seemed concerned that Bobby was lonely too. One day Bobby heard him and Vanetta talking in the kitchen while he stood in the doorway to the long hall; they must have thought he was back watching Superman on TV.

  ‘How’s our little guy doing, V?’

  ‘He’s okay, Mr Danziger. Time helps, you know.’

  ‘It will be four years next fall.’

  ‘Yes, sir, though he’s still got to be missing his mother.’

  ‘I know.’

  Vanetta said, ‘He be doin’ okay. But that’s one deep boy, Mr D.’

  His father laughed but there was a melancholy strain to it.

  ‘I tell you one thing,’ Vanetta offered. ‘He could do with some company his own age.’

  ‘I know, but he’s got Lily and Mike. They’re nice to him, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re okay. But they’re so much older that they won’t play with him, except when I ask them to.’ Vanetta said ‘ask’ like the word ‘axe’; Bobby had corrected her once, and she had said thank you. But she continued to say ‘axe’.

  His father must have been frowning, for Vanetta added, ‘It’s only natural, Mr D. Kids like to play with kids their own age.’

  Had anyone but Vanetta said this, Bobby would have felt betrayed. What she didn’t understand was that he was happy with the way things were. He knew his mother was gone for good, he did his best quite faithfully to remember her, staring at the photograph his father kept on top of his roll-top desk, trying to match the picture with some image in his head, and he knew too that something hard, and awful, and enduring had happened to them all.

  But the terrible thing he couldn’t admit even to himself was that he didn’t actually miss his mother much; he had trouble enough just remembering her. And with this secret came another one he kept to himself. As far as Bobby was concerned, Vanetta was his mother.

  There was actually plenty of company in the apartment, even if it wasn’t of his own age. Like Mike D’Amico with his grocery deliveries twice a week; he’d sit down sometimes and have a cup of coffee, especially if Vanetta needed time to go around the kitchen and sort out what they needed – the potatoes were in the pantry, but the fruit was on a shelf near the icebox, and the veg was in the icebox itself.

  Or Mr Tipps, a white Southerner who at Merrill’s instigation (acc
ording to Mike) repainted the entire apartment, and would take a break in the kitchen in the late afternoon, where he would explain to Vanetta and Bobby how man had descended from the coconut. ‘Just look at one,’ he’d say, tugging on a strap of his painter’s overalls. ‘Two eyes and hair just like a man’s.’

  On the ground floor, below their apartment, lived the Edeveks – Eddie, the janitor, and his wife. You had to be careful about jumping around in the living room or dining room, since they were directly below. But in the back bedroom there was no problem, since it was just the cavernous basement beneath. Once when Mike had broken a window in the back yard their father had paid Eddie to replace it, singing, ‘I write a cheque/ for Eddie Edevek’, which Bobby had thought absolutely hilarious but was forbidden to sing himself. A couple of times a year his father would do more than nod hello to Eddie, stopping in the vestibule to talk about their army days. Eddie never said much, but Bobby’s father described him as an amiable Polack, and said he had more common sense than all the academics of the neighbourhood put together. His father liked to tell how once, after a big storm, Eddie had pointed out at the street where snow lay unploughed and uncollected for the fifth day running in the sub-zero sun, and declared, ‘What this ward needs is a crooked alderman.’

  He was big enough now to walk part of the way home from school, and he’d go up the leafy block of Kenwood, until he reached the news-stand at Steinways. Then Abe, the old man who owned the news-stand, would take him by the hand, flag down the cars, and walk him across the street. It seemed unnecessary and humiliating to Bobby, and he hated the way Abe would envelop his little hand in his own sweaty one, his thumb black from newsprint. But his father insisted, and once a month would press a five-dollar bill on Abe to pay for the dubious service. Once across, Bobby would run the first few yards, keen to wipe away all trace of the old man, then skip down 57th Street until he’d catch sight of Vanetta waiting for him at the corner of Dorchester, her arms folded and a smile on her face. He’d sprint and jump up into her arms and she’d twirl him around before putting him down all dizzy, and then they’d walk the fifty yards past the empty lot to the back yard, along the thin alley next to the Christian Science church, up the stairs and home.