Chona lay in a private room on the top floor of the Reading hospital on a wing normally reserved for the critically ill or the dying. That was what the gentleman from Philadelphia, a rich theater owner of some kind, had insisted—and paid for—in cash. “I want it quiet,” he told the nurses at the station on the floor. He was apparently used to giving orders, which caused some resentment among the nurses. There was a rumor that the Jewess in 401 was from nearby Pottstown and involved in some kind of lawless fracas. They had not seen many Jews on that floor, nor did they see many Negroes like the nursemaid who sat next to the woman’s bed all day, her face often buried in a Bible. The Negro rarely smiled. She talked to staff directly in a terse voice. She was arrogant and disrespectful, the nurses decided. To make it worse, the Jew husband came and went at odd hours, not to mention there seemed to be Negroes shuffling in and out of that room all day. It was a bit much—rich Jews paying for private rooms, flooding the floor with Negroes. This country, they murmured among themselves, is going to hell in a handbasket.
Addie was unaware of these comments, as was Chona, who for four days lay comatose and presumed to be in a second coma from which, the doctors said, she was not expected to awaken. Addie was not so sure. Each morning Chona would stir, mumble, then fall back to unconsciousness. The first day, Addie thought nothing of it. But after three days of it, she suspected that the woman inside that body was alive.
Addie revealed this to Moshe when he arrived on the third day with Nate, with whom she hadn’t spoken since the incident. The two men walked in looking exhausted, explaining that a three-day set with a Yiddish theater troupe out of Pittsburgh doing Hamlet had taken a lot of setup and break-down time.
“So long as the people liked it,” Addie said. She tried to sound reassuring.
Moshe ignored her and sat without a word at his wife’s bedside. He was a mess. His shirt was soiled, his jacket worn. The bags beneath his eyes looked nearly big enough to hold eggs. He stared at Chona several moments, then said, “Anything new?”
“She’s trying to get it out.”
“Get what out?”
“That thing she does in the morning. She does it every time.”
There was a Jewish word for it, Addie knew, but she couldn’t remember it. “It’s a ditty. A prayer thing. She’s trying to do that. Every morning. For three days now.”
Moshe stared at his comatose wife, glanced at Addie, and waved his hand. “Leave us for a while,” he said.
Addie and Nate retreated to the hallway. Noting the baleful stares of the nurses, they moved to the stairwell, walked down the stairs, and stepped inside the foyer that faced the grassy hospital entrance, away from white ears and eyes. It was their first moment alone since the incident four days before.
“Ain’t no need to give him false hope,” Nate said.
“I ain’t joshing,” Addie said. “She’s yet living.”
“Leave that to the doctors.”
“I wouldn’t go to a doctor in these parts for a hundred Christmas turkeys,” Addie said. “Especially Doc Roberts.”
“You can’t right every wrong in the world,” Nate said.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Nate nodded at the hospital grounds, the white doctors, the neatly clad nurses patrolling past. “If someone ask you about what happened at the store, that’s how you play it. Say you wasn’t there.”
“But I was there. And I did see something. I come in the back door and seen what I seen.”
“Which was?”
“Doc Roberts ripping at her clothes, running his hands all over her like she was a piece of meat.”
Nate shot a glance at the hospital personnel gliding past, the doctors and nurses glancing at them as they made their way across the lobby and into the busy area out front by the lawn and the long arcing driveway where cars awaited. Two black visitors, clad as the help, standing in the shiny foyer of the Reading hospital was not a welcome sight.
“Don’t cite his name round here,” Nate said. “They might know him.”
“They oughta know him, foul rascal that he is.”
“This is white folks’ business. Keep out of it.”
“If it weren’t for him, Doc would’a had his way.”
“Doc’s having his way now,” Nate said. “It’s his word against a deaf and dumb colored child. That’s just sugar in his bowl.”
“Is that what Doc said?”
“To hear him tell it, he went to fetch Dodo and the boy jumped bad and attacked him. Miss Chona fell out on account of it. She got overcome and fainted away.”
“With her dress pulled over her head?” Addie said.
Nate shot a hot glance around them and hissed, “Goddamnit, you’ll sport real trouble fooling with these white folks’ lies. Stay out of it. Can’t nothing be done!” He spoke with intensity, but he kept his face impassive as a large group of doctors clad in white swept past them, laughing at some private joke.
“Is that why you was at Fatty’s two nights ago getting sloppy?”
Nate frowned. “It won’t happen no more.”
“What’s Dodo say?” Addie asked.
Nate was silent. Addie stared at him, her features hardening. Now it was her turn to be angry. “You ain’t seen him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know that they’ll let me in there,” he said.
“They’ll let a knock-kneed cow in there. It’s a nuthouse, not a prison. They ain’t gonna make you into a bellhop. They got visiting times.”
“I’m shy about going to them kind of places,” Nate said.
Addie frowned. So that was it. A man with a history he won’t share doesn’t want to go to a locked place. Not even for a visit. Not if he’s been in a locked place before himself.
“South Carolina’s far away,” she said, then added, “Whatever’s back there don’t matter. It’s what’s ahead of you that counts. Don’t nobody know you here.”
“They ought not to,” Nate said, “for I changed my name, too.”
Addie took that one in silence. That one was new.
She watched him sag and lean against the wall. His tall frame stooped, his eyes cast down in shame. She loved the gentle slope of his nose, the curve of his jaw, the way his head moved when he looked down, the arc of his shoulders. She placed a hand on the side of his face and rubbed it gently.
“You can forever remember the wrongs done to you as long as you live,” she said. “But if you forget ’em and go on living, it’s almost as good as forgiving. I don’t care who you was, or what you done, or even what you calls yourself. I know your heart. You look so tired.”
She snatched his hand fiercely and held it to her chest over her heart. Nate felt a surge of that old feeling, that shine, the light that she lit in him, and the anvil that sat atop his heart lifted.
“I planned to go. Took off work and everything. But I couldn’t make myself,” he confessed. “So I went to Fatty’s and made a fool of myself instead.”
“You ain’t the first in this world to put liquor to work.”
“Worse. I was rolling with that home brew. From down home.”
Addie chuckled. “No wonder you look so bad.”
Nate smiled bitterly. “I woke up the next morning feeling like the South Carolina State marching band was banging in my head. I seen them once, y’know. I was working a road crew, blacktopping a highway. You could hear ’em hammering them drums a mile off. Lord, when they turned the corner, must’ve been two hundred of ’em from the colored school there, pounding drums and tooting horns, dressed pretty as peacocks. That was something.”
He sighed, then rubbed his forehead and looked through the glass doors at the calm hospital grounds. “I expected Dodo might go to a college like that someday, make something of hisself. He’s smart, y’know. He can talk, can still hear things, y’know, little things. He had a chance.”
“What you mean had?”
“He ain’t getting outta where they sent him.”
“Who says he ain’t? We got to go see somebody about it.”
“We might as well be singing to a dead hog,” Nate said.
“What about asking Mr. Moshe?” she asked. “He’s got some sway.”
Nate shook his head. “Mr. Moshe ain’t hisself. Can barely run his theaters.” Nate thought a moment, then said, “Maybe Reverend Spriggs. He knows lots of the white folks.”
“He wouldn’t know nobody,” Addie said quickly.
“It won’t hurt to ask,” Nate said. “I can ask him.”
“Leave him be,” Addie said. “He’s too busy booming and Bible shaking and church yelling.”
“What’s Reverend done to you?”
Addie looked away, not trusting herself to speak, for if she did, she was afraid the truth would reveal a history that might send Nate, as a relative newcomer to Pottstown, having been there only nine years, trotting at Earl Spriggs with a knife, for she’d known Ed Spriggs from childhood to now. Ed Spriggs was a combination lowlife and nervous Nellie. Easily frightened, easily bought, easily deterred, especially when it came to the white man. His calling to God, she thought, was either a miracle or an excuse, but it didn’t matter. It was Ed Spriggs, she was sure, who had given Dodo away to the colored man from the state. Ed Spriggs was one of the few from Chicken Hill who knew Miss Chona hid Dodo over in Bernice’s yard, because Bernice went to his church. Bernice was a hard, difficult woman, moved neither by threats nor by nonsense. She would not tell the white man anything. But Bernice’s children went to Ed Spriggs’s church, too, and Ed Spriggs, lizard that he was, wouldn’t have to ask Bernice a thing about who played in her yard. He had only to ask one of her kids. Surely one would spill it.
“Ed Spriggs ain’t done nothing to me,” Addie said.
“Him and Bernice had some hot words in church yesterday.”
“ ’Bout what?”
Nate shrugged, then asked, “Bernice been here?”
“She come yesterday. She come in her church clothes. Must’a been right after church.”
“What she say?”
“I ain’t heard Bernice talk more than ten words since her daddy died and that was years ago. She set with Miss Chona awhile, then left.”
“Seems to me . . . ,” Nate said, then paused and asked, “How’d Doc Roberts know Dodo was on the Hill?”
“The colored man from the state must’ve told him.”
“And who told the man from the state Dodo was up there?”
“Nobody I know. Miss Chona hid him in Bernice’s yard with Bernice’s children when the man come. I was there most times when he come. He didn’t even look over at her yard.”
“Maybe Bernice told it.”
Addie frowned at him. “Bernice would not tell it.”
Nate spoke slowly. “Paper told me yesterday that Bernice was ranting in her house and whupping on one of her young’uns with a larded limb. One of the younger ones.”
“It ain’t nobody’s business how she raises her children,” Addie said, but she watched nervously as Nate began to put it together on his own. She watched the idea work its way into him, his tall figure looking thoughtful. He’d been bent and tired when he’d arrived, keeping his eyes averted as the doctors and nurses swept past, casting puzzled glares at the two Negroes in the lobby. But now, as the idea that Reverend Spriggs may have revealed Dodo to the state, given away the one good secret that Nate had for the price of a coffee cake or a down payment on a car or some small amount of acknowledgment from white folks, it was as if a caterpillar had cracked loose from its cocoon and an evil butterfly was emerging.
He leaned against a window and placed his arm against it, a slow, mellow movement that usually gave the impression of an easygoing fellow moving leisurely, with kind purpose. But the grim glow in his eyes held a kind of coiled fury, and it gave the slow movement an air of a tiger preparing to spring.
He asked softly, “Has Reverend Spriggs been by to see Miss Chona?” Before she could speak, he answered his own question. “Of course not.”
He stared straight ahead as he spoke, unaware now of the white folks passing by. There was some small wild thing in him trying to tear itself loose, kicking around just past his eyes, waiting to bust out. Watching it grow, Addie grew frightened. The devil, she thought. Watching him leaning his long, muscled arm against the windowpane, she briefly thought she was losing her mind, for she was exhausted from lack of sleep. Nate had never lifted a finger to anyone in their years together, not even to Dodo when the boy deserved it. She could not imagine it. Except she’d been warned. Paper had come to visit the hospital the day before, and Paper had delivered an explicit warning from Fatty.
“Fatty said watch Nate close.”
Addie had pegged the nervousness in Paper’s voice. And now, watching her husband standing in the hospital foyer, his face showing a suppressed, coiled fury, made her afraid. So she said, “Reverend Spriggs got no cause to come round here to see Miss Chona.”
“He’s a reverend, ain’t he? Don’t they visit the sick?”
“She got her own Jewish reverend. She don’t need Reverend Spriggs.”
“He went to see the baker Mr. Eugenio when Mr. Eugenio was sick, didn’t he? I believe Mr. Eugenio was Catholic.”
“A reverend don’t have time to see everybody,” Addie said, trying to ward him off. “They mostly see people from their own church.”
Nate was silent a moment, then said, “Spriggs is close to that Doc Roberts. Even I know that.”
“Let’s do what you said,” Addie said quickly. “Let’s keep out of white folks’ business, honey.”
Nate was silent. He was unreachable.
Addie tried once more. “Would you do me one favor, sweetie?” she said.
Nate looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “What is it, woman?”
“Don’t call me woman! I’m your wife!”
She saw the rage in his eyes give way to sulk and hurt, and in that moment, Addie knew she still had his heart. So she made her pitch.
“Go see how Dodo’s getting along. I got a few things together for him at the house. Some things to wear, some sweet things to eat. Go fetch them things, then g’wan down to the store—Paper’s running it—and put her on the phone to them people over at Pennhurst. She’s good at talking to white folks. Let her set it up so you can go see him. It’ll do you good.”
Nate peered into his wife’s searching, pleading brown eyes, then down at her hand on his chest, the long fingers that wiped the sweat off his face after work, that knitted his pants and stroked his ear and cared for him in ways that he’d never been cared for as a child. And the rage that overcame him eased.
“I ain’t good in them kind of places,” he said. “But I will think on it.”