The days El spent in our house zipped by quickly. That was partly because I’d thrown James, El, and myself into a situation that required us to be on the alert each second so we wouldn’t say the wrong thing and upset the delicate diplomatic balance in our home. Living on the edge has a way of making time go faster. Also, we had a stream of people in and out of the house, creating a constant buzz of activity.
Barbara Jean dropped by daily, sometimes alone and sometimes with Ray. A physical therapist from the hospital came over to work with El every afternoon. Clarice was too busy practicing for her big show to come much, but she called each evening. We talked about El, her ongoing spiritual battle with Miss Beatrice, and the joys of grandmothering. We never once discussed her upcoming move back into the house with Richmond, and she didn’t have a word to say about what I could tell was near panic over the Chicago concert. I was already doing more than my share of pushing other folks to open up. I didn’t pester Clarice. Besides, I had a strong feeling that that dam would burst soon enough.
Forrest Payne came by the second day El was with us and almost every day after that. He arrived laden with stories of the old days at the Pink Slipper to relive with El, most of them at least a little bit dirty. I’d thought I knew all the stories about Aunt Marjorie, but it turned out there were still one or two more. And they were doozies.
The first night Forrest came by, we sat in the family room—Forrest, Miss Beatrice, El, and me. I’d served everyone lemonade, except Miss Beatrice. Though it was less than a week from the Fourth of July and sweltering outside, she drank her customary hot tea. She was visibly saddened by both the brand of Earl Grey in her mug and the low quality of the mug itself. Her frown deepened when Forrest mentioned my aunt.
“Did you hear about Marjorie and the fire?” Forrest asked me.
When I said that I hadn’t heard that story, he said, “The dancers were doin’ a patriot show with sparklers, and one of them accidently tossed her sparkler off behind the band. Next thing we knew, the curtains were on fire and the place was filling with smoke. You remember, El?”
El said, “Yeah, I remember.” I saw him smile for the first time then, and I was looking at James with a couple of added decades.
“Smoke was everywhere, and the customers started runnin’ for the front door. So many folks tried to squeeze out at once that they made a logjam and nobody could move. I started to think I was gonna die. But Marjorie barreled through the crowd, pickin’ people up and tossin’ them out of the way till she got to the head of the line and cleared the jam. She was a sight to see.”
I asked, “Did anybody get hurt in the fire?”
Forrest peeped out his high-pitched giggle and said, “That’s the best part. Turned out the fire was mostly smoke. Bubba, the sax player, opened his pants, peed on the curtains, and doused the flames. But since Marjorie was the real hero that night, we told everybody it was her that pissed the fire out. Marjorie bein’ Marjorie, she went along with the lie. Not a single person we told doubted it was true.”
Poor Miss Beatrice was thoroughly scandalized. She’d only come with Forrest so she could lead a prayer at the end of their visit, but she had ended up being subjected to my cheap tea, a dollar-store mug, and a tale about dancing girls, urine, and Aunt Marjorie.
The reminiscing tickled Forrest. His voice going even higher, he squealed, “Were you there when Marjorie chucked off her overalls and spun around the stripper pole?”
He turned to me and said, “Big Marjorie yanked that pole clean out of the floor. I’m tellin’ you, the audience saw more ass in that five minutes than they’d seen all month.”
Miss Beatrice launched into some heavy-duty entreaties to Jesus then. She prayed for a solid half hour. Forrest never did get to the end of his tale about Aunt Marjorie. On his way out the door, though, Forrest whispered in my ear that he’d finish the story the next time he saw me.
With all the talking going on at the house, precious little of it was between James and his father. El was more of a talker than James, but that’s not saying much. James can make just about anyone seem like a chatterbox. El was downright animated when the conversation touched on music. He was proud of the places he’d played and the songs he’d written—150 of them, he claimed. The darkness that nearly always emanated from him lifted whenever he spoke of his songs, his bands, or his guitar.
James was the true music lover in our house, though he practically bit my head off when I suggested that he might have inherited his affinity for music from El. James had bought most of the recordings we owned. It was James, not me, who had decreed that our daughter, Denise, would become a pianist. He dragged her to lessons with Clarice every week for five years, until Clarice called a halt to the torture—Denise’s and her own. It was due to James’s desire to have musicians in the family that Jimmy and Eric tormented our neighbors with, respectively, the drums and the trumpet. James wasn’t interested in sharing much of anything about himself with his father. He made no mention of our amateur-musician children.
We were having dinner on Friday night when I told El that it had been a surprise for us to learn that he was a musician. I thought that was a safe way into a topic they’d both enjoy. But there was danger in every subject where El and James were concerned.
El froze with his fork at his lips. After he set his fork back on his plate, he stared at me as if he were in shock. “Ruth never told you I was a blues man?”
James said, “Mama told me you played the guitar, but she never made it sound like it was a big deal. She didn’t tell me it was your job.”
With no bitterness, as far as I ever saw, Miss Ruth had explained to James that El was a man who carried misery with him wherever he went. She’d told James that his father was a junkie. She’d been direct with him about how El had disappeared from their lives and left them without a penny. El knew all of that. I’d told him myself in the car ride to our house. But, amazingly, what El couldn’t bear to hear was that Miss Ruth had left out that he was a blues man.
El said, “I suppose Ruth did what she thought was best. I just figured my music would be the one thing she would tell you about me for sure.” Then he said to James, “When I’m gone, I’d like for you to have my guitar. It has your mother’s name engraved on it.”
James surprised me by angrily spitting out, “I don’t play the guitar.”
Here it comes, I thought. He’s finally going to let loose the explosion that I had hoped to engineer. The truth would be spoken, or yelled, at last. The right questions would get asked, and some real answers might be offered. But James caught himself and added, in a calmer, more even tone, “I’m sure one of the grandkids would be happy to have it.” The subject was abandoned for a chat about the weather.
After dinner the next night, El went to his room and brought out a picture of James as a toddler; he was sitting in his father’s lap, next to El’s leopard-spotted guitar. In the picture, smooth-faced young El was dressed in a tight-fitting shirt that showed off his muscular arms. His teeth, now deeply stained, gleamed white as he grinned at the camera. It wasn’t just that he had aged. In 1952, El’d had a wild energy about him that made you think the picture might burst into flame at any second. He was all vitality and light.
The most remarkable aspect of the photo was that young El’s affectionate gaze was clearly fixed on his guitar, not on the child squeezed next to it on his lap. He looked at the instrument so intently that I wondered if the baby hadn’t been tossed aside the moment the camera’s flash died out.
In a dreamy voice, El said, “I still remember when your mother took that picture. I had just got the camera, and I said, ‘Ruthie, I want a picture of me and my baby.’ It was a real nice day.”
I am not, by nature, a forgiving woman. I hold grudges, and to be honest about it, I often enjoy holding them. But right then, as I listened to El talk about that day, decades ago, when his wife snapped a picture of him and his son, I knew I couldn’t maintain my hatred of him.
El was a frail old man who wore his regrets like a weight around his neck. He deserved to wear that yoke, and I wasn’t making excuses for him or even thinking about granting him the forgiveness he hadn’t been man enough to seek from James. I just couldn’t stoke that furnace of anger like I had been doing. Here he was, smiling with nostalgia about his sweet memory of taking a picture with “his baby,” and nearly sixty years later, this pitiful man still couldn’t see how plainly the photo advertised to the world that his real “baby” wasn’t his son.