Mama seated herself across from him, in all her preposterous gear. Hallie put a warning finger to her lips. The girls exchanged looks part fear and part wonder.
‘I’m a Protestant by birth but a Catholic by descent,’ Mama felt it was time to explain the curious no-man’s land of her faith, ‘I’ve shod the horse all around.’ Meaning she had had four husbands. ‘So I’m not acceptable to the Church. But if I can’t die sanctified I hope to die blessed.’
His elbow touched Floralee’s glass. It tottered, he reached as if to keep it from tipping and knocked it over, of course, instead. The girl pushed back her chair and he began mopping it up with a silk handkerchief, although all he was doing actually was swishing the handkerchief around in it. ‘Go on with your story,’ he told Mama, ‘I’m sorry to be so clumsy.’
Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she had four husbands.
‘Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man – I’d never marry another legit man. Did you know that a prize fighter is more gentle than other men, outside the ring? That’s because he knows what a man’s fists can do. Do you know that you’re safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That’s because one knows what killing is. The other don’t.’
‘Why,’ Navy remarked, ‘in that case ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.’
Again that odd little silence fell. Nobody knew what to say to that.
‘Navy, I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I’ve been in the trade,’ Hallie said – and his elbow tipped Mama’s glass into her lap.
‘Now don’t tell me that “just happen,”’ Mama scolded in real earnest now – ‘Don’t tell me any man is that clumsy. Mister, my frank opinion is you done that a-purpose.’
‘Honest, I didn’t, Mammy,’ he lied patiently.
‘Don’t whup him, Mama,’ Floralee pleaded for him.
‘I’m sure he wont do it again,’ Hallie defended him too.
‘Give me one more chance, Mama,’ he whimpered.
‘Only out of respect for your uniform,’ Mama issued final warning, ‘and one more is all you gets.’ She turned to shake out her skirts, somebody tittered and somebody honked and she whirled just in time to catch him with two fingers to his nose. Now Mama scarcely knew what to feel.
‘Why, that isn’t the least bit nice, a man of your background to have such manners—’
‘He didn’t mean anything, Mama,’ Hallie was sure.
‘Don’t whup him,’ Floralee begged.
‘Cross my heart I didn’t mean anything,’ Navy swore in that same unbearable small-boy whine that in itself entitled him to a thrashing.
‘O he meant it all right,’ Kitty informed, ‘I saw him with my naked eye – and I have a very naked eye.’
‘I will try to do better, please mum,’ he promised so humbly, ‘I will try to behave and be a good boy—’ and standing to cross his promise, yanked tablecloth, bottle, glasses, trays, cokes, decanters and four bottles of beer crashing to the floor.
‘O you fool’s fool,’ now Mama roared right at him, black with rage as he turned white with fright, neither pretending in the least – right under the table the two-hundred pound hero ducked. And cowering there all could hear him plea – ‘Don’t whup me, Mama, please don’t whup me.’
Unable to reach him with her fist, Mama seized his black silk ankles and hauled him forth floundering on his back, his eyes closed and covered by his arm to ward off anticipated blows.
‘I don’t like the looks of this,’ Mama told Hallie, ‘he aint got no right to be so loose without being drunk or sick, neither.’
‘He’s sick enough for twenty,’ Hallie informed her. ‘Somebody get some water.’
‘Wouldn’t beer do as well?’ Floralee inquired, and emptied a full pitcher right in his face. Then, looking into her pitcher, grew sad. ‘Why, it’s empty, fun’s all done.’ She looked ready to cry.
‘Use cokes,’ Hallie ordered.
Now who but Hallie could have thought of that? Floralee leaped for the half-finished bottles standing like small sentries on ledge and divan, and in no time at all had her pitcher full again. This time she poured it down the front of his shirt.
‘That was fun,’ she told Hallie then.
‘The fun is done,’ Hallie told her.
‘Fun done,’ the girl accepted matters.
But on the floor the fun had only begun. There he lay licking his big ox-tongue, a coke-licking Lazarus too languid to rise.
‘I’ve been everywhere God got land,’ Mama announced, ‘but this is the most disgusting sight yet seen.’
‘You can drop his legs now,’ Hallie pointed out, and Mama released the ankles, that dropped like a dead man’s legs.
Both women stood looking down. Hallie herself didn’t know what to do with the fellow.
As Navy finally opened his eyes.
His eyes so blue, so commanding.
‘That was the nicest party I’ve had in twelve years,’ he congratulated everyone.
Mama lowered herself in all her finery, onto a divan and sighed, just sighed.
‘Bring me the evening paper,’ she asked after a while, ‘I want to see what the white folks are up to.’
The figure, the face and the gleaming braid of the madman who had spent a month’s pay in a night dimmed swiftly. His money long spent, nobody cared what had become of the Lieutenant-in-Command.
‘I wonder,’ Mama grew suspicious later, ‘whether that officer told us the entire truth.’
‘So far as he knew it,’ Hallie took a guess.
‘You figure he left out a little something or other?’
‘Black Mammy wasn’t as simple as he likes to think. I think she had lapped the field.’
‘I don’t follow your meaning.’
‘Why, I think from the day she paddled that little boy, she knew what kind of material she was working with. I think whether that little boy became a man or stayed a little boy was entirely up to her. She had a choice between herself and the boy, and she chose against the boy. That was the only way she had of not one day losing him to a white girl.’
‘I’d purely hate to believe that a common field darky could be that evil,’ Mama turned Hallie’s theory down cold.
‘She wasn’t a field darky. She was a house darky with scores to settle in that same house. Everything she had the white folks had taken. She saw her chance to get something back. I’ll take my oath she was getting even on somebody.’
‘No,’ Mama still declined to believe, ‘everybody got to love somebody and that woman wasn’t give nobody but a little white boy to love, and he wasn’t give nobody but an old black mammy. When things are like that color and age even don’t matter. In love, not even price matter. Yes, Black Mammy genuinely love that child.’
‘It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,’ Hallie agreed. ‘In love price don’t matter nor which lover pays. It’s why he can’t hate her even to this day though he knows now what she did to him.’
Though the languid lieutenant was far to sea – gone without trace never to return, his visits began a slow sea change. He had spent so freely Finnerty had been encouraged to believe there must be other such fools about, in uniform or out. Finnerty was right.