AFTER TAKING HIS FIRST step through the open door of 411, which was nearly as wide as it was tall to leave room for wheelchairs and gurneys, Doc reversed himself and double-checked the number on the wall outside.
He had half-expected to find the impoverished madam in a ward, or at most a semi-private room. Number 411 was equipped with a small sitting room containing a sofa, love seat, and chairs upholstered in gray tweed and oil paintings on the walls, with a connecting door to a corner bedroom with windows on two adjacent walls looking out on the city. Beatrice Blackwood, in her pageboy wig and a pink bed jacket with a spray of rhinestones on the left shoulder, was sitting up in bed reading a large-print edition of Countee Cullen’s Copper Sun. Behind her glasses she had an egg-shaped perforated aluminum patch taped over her left eye. Her face was made up lightly and expertly. She looked younger than she had at Wilson McCoy’s funeral, but then here she controlled the light. The reading lamp was switched off and the sunlight coming between the vertical louvers over the windows was obsequious. Doc felt a flash of certainty that he had just stepped onto a stage set for his entrance.
“My stars, is it that time?” she asked when he greeted her. “I guess I am getting old. Give me ten minutes, please.”
“Do you need help?”
“Beatrice has been dressing herself for more than seventy years.” She swung two long ruby-nailed feet, slightly wrinkled, out from under the covers and into a pair of furry white slippers on the floor.
He retreated to the sitting room and closed the connecting door. The room was filled with flowers, small bouquets of peonies in throwaway vases and big displays of roses and orchids that reminded him of gangland send-offs in the movies. He recognized the names of some Detroit city councilmen and a judge or something on several of the cards. Most of the rest ran along the lines of Captain Jack, Mighty Dee, and the Rap City Ring. The splash of colors was enough to make him forget he was in a hospital.
In scarcely more than the promised ten minutes, the door opened and the woman stepped out wearing a mauve suit that caught her below the knees and flared out at the shoulders. Doc suspected the jeweled butterfly perched on the side of her head belonged to a pin securing the wig to her own hair. The piratical eye patch should have clashed with the Victorian gray kid gloves and gold jabot at her throat, but it didn’t. A word came to mind, shimmering to the surface from the dim depths of his forgotten education: courtesan.
From the flowered hat she’d had on when he first met her to the muted gaiety of her appearance in this room full of blossoms, Doc was beginning to associate Beatrice Blackwood with a universe of color, and to consider the scale of the tragedy should modern medical science fail to restore her sight.
“Does Beatrice look that bad?” she asked, showing her sculpted teeth. “Never trust a woman who wears a uniform to hang up your clothes for you.”
“You look great”
“You’re a gentleman. I look old. Would you bring out my suitcase? I’m not allowed to lift anything heavier than five pounds.”
It was white pigskin with two straps, very old but beautifully kept, like its owner. When he carried it out into the sitting room, a black nurse with big hips and orange hair was folding down the footplates on a wheelchair.
“Beatrice almost invested in this hospital.” She allowed the nurse to help her into the chair. “Then she decided that the kind of mind that would get you up and walking as soon as possible after surgery, then forbid you to walk out the front door, couldn’t be trusted with her money.”
The nurse laughed, a not unpleasant bray. “Sending someone back for the flowers, sugar?”
“Distribute them to the other patients. I can’t stand to watch things die.”
“Very generous. You want a receipt for your taxes?”
“Of course.”
Down in the lobby Doc left them to get the Coachmen and bring it up under the canopy. He was a little worried about getting the old woman up into the passenger’s seat, but using the toolbox from the back for a stepping stool and taking one of her hands and supporting her back with his other palm, he lifted her in with little effort. She looked tall when standing on her own, but he towered over her by more than a foot and she weighed almost nothing. She told him she lived on McGraw.
The afternoon rush hour was under way, and for several streets he was too busy maneuvering the great towering rectangle among cars desperate to get out of the city before the sun went down. Leaving behind the commercial district and gliding through neighborhoods of old houses with missing shingles, burnt-out lawns, and a shiny orange basketball hoop attached to every garage, he relaxed. “How’d the operation go?”
“Well, I’m reading street signs. I couldn’t do that before. In a couple of months I’m going back to get the other eye done. I haven’t finished a book in one sitting in two years.”
“I guess you’re used to being independent.”
“I’ll never get used to that,” she said; and Doc had the impression that that conversation had ended. But he thought about it all the way to her place.
It was a brownstone in a block of them separated by common walls, five stories high with plywood in some of the windows and crushed cans and broken bottles tossed behind wrought-iron railings designed to enclose gardens in genteel days. A trio of black youths in parachute pants and sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders looked up from the stoop they were sitting on as the motor home drifted to a stop against the curb. The twin speakers of a boom box perched on top of one of the railings gargled and coughed in rhythm with rap’s kidney-crushing beat. Doc felt them watching as he climbed the steps of the place next door, his free hand on Beatrice Blackwood’s elbow. He carried the pigskin suitcase in the other.
The foyer smelled of mildew and old urine. Doc rested his thumb on the soiled white rubber call button next to the old woman’s name on the directory. “Anybody there?”
“Try it.”
He pressed. A buzzer razzed and he pushed open the inner door. They rode a clanking old brass-plated elevator to the fourth floor, where he had to give the doors a nudge when they stuck halfway open. The hallway, lit by unshaded electric bulbs spaced too far apart in the ceiling and painted dark green over the plaster and wainscoting, smelled like the foyer, but someone had added Lysol.
Stopping at her door, he heard music inside. It sounded like Otis Redding. The door opened away from his knuckles and a broad black male face confronted his at a level, something that didn’t happen often. Doc recognized one of the men who had escorted Beatrice Blackwood into the funeral home. He had on what looked like the same dark suit and conservative tie, as if he had just returned from another service. Doc felt a flash of suspicion and hostility between them like an electric arc: the race thing. Then the man’s eyes went to Beatrice and his face metamorphosed into something Doc would never see directed at him.
“You look like a pirate,” was the first thing he said.
Doc could have done better than that.
The man’s name was Truman. Doc never found out if it was his first or his last, because she only introduced him by the one name. He didn’t shake Doc’s hand, but he opened the door wide enough to let them both in with no show of reluctance, and Doc assumed that he was just socially awkward. He was carrying around thirty pounds more than he should have, but he moved them well enough to have had some training as an athlete. Doc guessed boxing; flat scar tissue glittered like pieces of Scotch tape at the corners of both eyebrows.
He didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because in the next second bright light flooded the dim apartment and a lot of people were yelling something all at once that might have been “Surprise!” The timing was off, as it always was, and some people started early and one or two others missed the moment and it ended in untidy tatters.
Doc’s was the only white face in the room. The guests—it seemed at first there were a hundred of them, but it was more like twenty—had been seated and standing around the room with the curtains closed and most of the lights off, and the sudden illumination as the switches were turned had dazzled him, but it was just normal lamplight in a room full of tobacco smoke. Unlike Truman, the others were dressed anything but conservatively, in bright colors and jewelry that clanked and sporting an occasional gold tooth. Doc looked around to see if Needles and his friends were there, but he soon determined that he was the youngest person present by at least ten years.
Beatrice made no attempt to look surprised. She smiled and stood still and turned her cheeks this way and that for kisses and allowed herself to be embraced. There seemed to be a kind of protocol in the order in which the others came forward to bestow their affections, but it didn’t seem to be according to age, as some of the grayer heads came later, and he decided he didn’t know enough about the hierarchy to follow the pattern. He was largely—but not pointedly—ignored.
The room was more of a surprise than the party. The furniture was dyed leather and polished wood and chrome, the hardwood floor buffed to a satiny sheen, and underneath the cigarette odor the place smelled of citrus wax and regular airing. Books lined built-in shelves in a wall papered in bright yellow. Beatrice Blackwood had managed through no small effort and expense to construct a moat between her home and the squalor of her neighborhood without abandoning it.
Beatrice’s queenly reserve shattered in a squeal that prickled Doc’s skin under his clothes. She tottered forward, arms out, dividing the crowd, and bent to embrace an old man seated in an easy chair in the corner. Completely bald to the narrow brim of his Tyrolean, he had the dark gaunt look of an African wood carving. The lenses of his gold-rimmed half-glasses were opaque and the cane his long bony hands were folded on was bamboo with a broad white band halfway down its shaft in the universal symbol of the blind. His suit was electric blue, cut extravagantly, and he wore black silk socks and alligator shoes. He unfolded one hand to pat her on the back.
“Gidgy, I heard you was dead and buried.” Her Jamaican-accented speech had slipped from cultured third-person to street argot.
“Buried, anyways. Croakers won’t even let me smoke the weed no more.”
“That ain’t no Chesterfield there in the ashtray.”
“Sweet thing, I done turned eighty last month. I was running out of things to do that I ain’t supposed to.”
“You still selling?”
“No. Hell, no. That damn crack has gone and roont the drug culture. I only deals in Acapulco and Asian and I can’t get my price. You still selling?”
“No. That AIDS thing got everybody staying home pulling they own chain. You hear about Quincy?”
“I heard he died.”
“Well, you knew him, how he was built. He didn’t weigh no more than ninety pounds at the end.”
“I always told that boy he’d fuck hisself to death.” He pointed the cane in Doc’s general direction. “Who’s that white boy you got with you?”
“Can you see him?”
“Somebody looked out the window. He one of them Libber Als?”
Beatrice remembered her manners then, disengaged herself from the old man, and came over to grasp Doc’s arm. “This is Doc Miller, he drove me over from the hospital. He works for Maynard Ance. You all know Maynard.” The sculpted tones were back.
Doc felt a general lifting of the atmosphere then, as if a window had been opened. He wondered how many digits that assembly totaled in past bond. Beatrice went off to mingle. Doc was offered a drink by a woman with her hair cropped close to her skull and a forked scar on her left cheek that crinkled the skin around that eye when she smiled. He accepted a vodka and water. Somebody else offered him something to eat, and he became aware then of the sweet smell of hot grease. One minute later he was holding a paper plate weighted down with ribs in a maroon sauce. The volume on the old-fashioned cabinet stereo was turned up, and it was straight Lou Rawls, Stevie Wonder, and Martha and the Vandellas from then on. The woman with the scar was talking to Beatrice when the music got louder. She raised her voice. “ …another surprise. Truman?”
The big man in the dark suit set his paper plate down on the stereo, rapped gently at a side door, listened with his ear to the panel, and pushed it open. Alcina Lilley came out.