Black Nightgown
by K.W. Jeter
Everyone knew.
Everyone knows, he murmured to himself. His lips brushed across the white skin of her neck, the soft region between her throat and ear, when he spoke aloud, a whisper, her name. His lips brushed across the delicate strands of hair that trembled with the exhalation of his breath. He breathed in her scent that wasn’t roses but just as sweet. He murmured her name, he couldn’t stop himself, and she shifted in his arms but didn’t wake.
They all knew, but he didn’t care. Not here in this world that he wrapped his arms around and was held by at the same time. A world bound by her scent and their mingled warmth, caught by the tunnelled sheets and the white-tasselled covers. Her breasts encircled by his arm . . .
Outside, in that other world, the streetlamp’s blue merged with the faint shadows of the moon. The thin light slid around the edges of the curtain, made empty shapes of her bedroom dresser and the door that led to the rest of the empty, silent house. She moved in his embrace, eyes closed, her mouth parting slightly, her breath a sigh.
“They all know.”
Another’s whisper. His sweat felt cold upon his naked shoulders. He turned his face away from hers and looked up at the figure standing beside the bed.
Her dead husband could see through the drawn curtain and through the walls of all the houses lining the street, the lights left on in kitchens and sleeping hallways shining through the red bricks as though through glass.
“Your mother . . . your sisters . . . even your father.” The dead man looked away from the window and everything beyond, turning toward his sleeping wife. “They all know.”
Of course his mother and sisters would know. He brought his face back down to hers. They had known before any of this had ever come about. He closed his eyes, lashes brushing the curve of her cheekbone. His father would never speak of what he knew. He kissed the corner of her mouth.
They all know . . .
And now he did as well. He knew; he knew something.
He held her fast in the night of their small world. Held her, and felt her dead husband watching them. Watching them in the great night’s world.
The women spoke the old world’s language. The mothers less than the grandmothers, and the daughters only a few words. But they all knew, and understood. The grey-haired poked their tree-root fingers through the shelled peas, the bowls held in their laps as they sat gossiping to each other or murmuring to themselves; the youngest turned their dark-eyed gaze at him as he stepped into the street to pass by their jump ropes slapping the cracked sidewalk. Whisper into each other’s ears, laugh and run away, their white anklets flashing like the teeth of an ocean’s waves.
He asked his father what women talked about.
“Christ in his fucking Heaven—who knows?” Sweating through his undershirt as a cleaver snapped free the ribs of a dangling carcass, the knotted spine turned naked as a row of babies’ fists. In the store’s glass-fronted cabinets, the mounds of beef liver glistened like soft, wet rubies. “Ask them and get told what a fool you are.” Drops of blood spattered the sawdust and the broken leather of his father’s boots.
Outside the door, with the slow overhead fan trying to keep the flies away, the little girls’ ropes had been left behind like shed snakeskins.
He rang open the cash register and sorted out the dollar bills that the neighborhood housewives had paid him for their deliveries. His hands still smelled like raw sausages and the red water that had leaked through the wrapping paper.
Later, he took a beer from the case kept just inside the door of the meat locker, a privilege he’d earned when he’d started shaving, and sat in the alley doorway. He tossed his stained white apron across a hook on the rail that the slaughterhouse trucks backed up to, and tilted his head to drink the bottle half-empty. He could watch, undetected as an evening ghost, as the married women walked by the alley’s mouth, flat summer sandals and arms shining from the tarry pavement’s heat. The shy, pretty one who had married last autumn bent her head over her newborn. All their voices were like the sounds of nesting birds, too soft to tell what they were saying.
He rolled the bottle between his wet hands. He knew that they were probably talking, among other things, about him and the widow.
“She oughta wax that upper lip of hers.” That was what his oldest sister had said, not because the woman had a moustache, but because she was so dark and wore hollow gold bracelets on her wrists like a gypsy. She looked like their grandmother’s wedding photograph, the framed sepia oval in the hallway. His other sisters had giggled behind their hands, though the widow wasn’t any darker than any of them.
She hadn’t been a widow then. Her husband was a Cracow dandy and still alive. That was what his mother called a man who wore a pinstripe suit with a waist nipped in like a woman’s. A hat and a red silk tie that turned black around the knot, like a hummingbird’s throat. It must have been winter when he’d heard his mother call the man that, because he remembered the kitchen window being covered with steam from the pots upon the stove. His father had sat at the table eating, his suspenders hanging loose from his waist, his big-knuckled fists swallowing the knife and fork. She’d glanced back at his father, her husband, then leaned across the sink to look out the part of the window she’d wiped transparent with her hand, looking out at the men talking under the streetlight, the shoulders of their thin jackets hunched up against the cold, their breath silver mingled plumes.
“A Cracow dandy,” she’d said again, her voice filled with the same terrible empty longing it held when she spoke of her dead father. It must have been something she’d heard from her dead mother; she’d been born here. What did she know of the old world? Nothing but the old language, and less of that than her mother and her grandmother had known.
The last of the beer had warmed between his hands; on his tongue, it tasted sour and flat. He leaned forward, elbows against his knees, and watched the little girls run past the alley, called to set the tables for their fathers and older brothers who would be coming home from work soon.
He had wondered if the widow still set a place for her dead husband. And then he had found out.
Before that, he could have asked his mother—he would have, regardless of his father’s warning—if it was something women do. Were supposed to do, an empty plate in front of an empty chair. He would have, except that he knew his mother and all his sisters were on the other side of the blood feud that had broken out in the parish church. It was doubtful if his mother would say anything now, good or bad, about any of that tribe, the widow included.
Something about the altar flowers; those were all women’s doing, their world, so he could never be sure of the exact details. The priest had told the women to make room in the flower rotation for the newcomers, the ones who’d come to live in the parish only a few years ago, arriving with all their children and husbands and sons, bringing with them the air of the old world, the one that has been left a generation before. The newcomers’ presence could be endured in silence, but the priest’s order had caused grumbling among the women.
He took another sip of the beer’s dregs and wondered how many languages the priest spoke. Not the languages that changed from place to place, but the other, the secret ones. The priest was like some black, slightly threadbare angel, neither man nor woman, occupying a barren holy ground between them. Perhaps he knew what women talked about, understood what they said; perhaps he had talked about the altar flowers in their own tongue.
Grumbling, then bad words in a language anyone could understand. He remembered his own mother muttering something under her breath as she’d passed by one of the newcomer women in the street—not the yet-to-be widow, but one of her cousins—her eyes narrowing as though the bell-like rattle of the other woman’s gold bracelets made the fillings in her teeth ache. It could only get worse, and did. Especially after the toad crawled from the chalice at the altar rail.