“I can see me sometime holdin my own little baby,” the retarded woman said after they sat down on a bench facing the White House, “rockin her and feedin her and doin such.” The sun was warm, and Caesar sat on the grass Indian-style a few feet behind the women. He opened a newspaper he had taken from a trash can, but he watched the tourists taking photographs and the government people eating their lunches.
“Thought everything would work with Fred and me,” the retarded woman said. “He like the job they got him. Me and him would sit on the stoop, makin plans bout our future.”
Caesar knew about her Fred, but he had never learned if he was one of those loud talkers he had seen in the first weeks at the bus stop.
“People call us the lovebirds,” the retarded woman said. “‘Look at em. Look at them lovebirds.’”
The old woman was eating orange pieces from a small plastic bag, and now and again, when the breeze shifted, the smell of oranges came to Caesar. He watched a black family come up to a very old white man at the Lafayette statue. The father gave his camera to the white man and then stood in front of the statue beside his wife and behind his three children. The oldest boy closed his eyes and would not open them again until it was all done. The old man took the family’s picture, and when the mother raised one finger, the old man advanced the film and snapped again.
“Then he commence to change. He talk back to Miss Prentiss,” the retarded woman was saying. “His job call Miss Prentiss and said he all the time late. Wouldn’t do what they told him.”
“Anna, he musta told you what was the matter,” the old woman said.
“No, ma’am, Miss Elsie,” the retarded woman said. “He never did. Yesday I got home, a car came with two men and they took him back to Laurel.” Caesar watched as the father read what was on the side of the statue and then the father looked up at the man on the horse, shading his eyes. His little girl did the same.
The black family crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, and the father gave the oldest boy the camera so he could take pictures of the White House. Then they went down to the corner and joined the line going in.
Caesar was only half listening; there was no more that would help on Friday. The problem would be Carol. He put the newspaper aside and lay down, closing his eyes. He would not follow them back to work. On another day not long ago, he had waited for the retarded woman across the street in front of the copier business until she got off from work. He had followed her to the bus stop. She was overweight, and he saw that walking was not easy for her in the heat. For the first time since he had been following her, she was not wearing her uniform. She had on a blue skirt and a pink blouse, which she wore outside the skirt. She had on tiny, gold-plated earrings a person might not notice until he was within a foot or so of her, and that was how close he was when he walked past her. She smelled of garlic and, beneath that, of a soap that reminded him of the halls in the hospital where his mother had died.
It was a crime, Sherman had said, to fall asleep anywhere but in a safe place, and so he was up and off a few minutes after the women left. He felt he wanted to see Sherman and left the park at the corner of Pennsylvania and 16th, heading in the direction where he thought the museum was. In both his lives, he had never come down to the world below Constitution Avenue, except for those times when relatives came from out of town. His mother and father would bring everyone down to see the Washington they put on postcards and in the pages of expensive coffee-table books. He knew that his father worked in one of the government buildings, but he didn’t know which one. His father was the kind of man who, if he looked out his office window and saw his son, would come down the stairs three at a time and hold him until someone called the police. “Call the law! I have a thief who robbed me! Call the law!”
At 15th and Constitution, among the tourists and office workers, he gave up the idea of seeing Sherman. It would be better to start working on Carol. He could see no problems with Anna, the retarded woman, but retarded or not, she was still a woman and there was a danger of her being skittish. He called Carol at work.
He told her that he loved her, then he told her that he missed her. In his mind, he read the words written on her notes.
“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder. You made my day.”
He promised to fix her dinner before he went to Manny’s and he told her once again that he loved her.
“I wish I could record that,” she said, “and play it back any time I wanted.”
IV
When people found out that Angelo Billings, Caesar’s cousin, had in fact stolen the flowers from an I Street florist and taken them to the funeral home, they said he would never again have good luck. Never mind, they said, that he loved Caesar’s mother as much as he loved anyone and that stealing the flowers was his way of showing that love. There were some things God would not tolerate, and stealing flowers for the dead was one of them.
Caesar, though, was moved, and they grew closer after his mother’s funeral. Angelo introduced him to Sherman. Angelo, before Caesar gave up on school, would wait for him outside Cardozo High, and they would go to Sherman’s two-bedroom apartment on 16th Street, a few blocks up from Malcolm X Park. What fascinated Caesar most about the apartment was the dominance of sound, of noise, as if Sherman were afraid of silence. In every room, there was something playing each second of the day, whether a radio or television or cassette player. In the bathroom, hanging from the shower curtain rod, there was a transistor radio that played around the clock. Sherman lived alone in the apartment, but he had two children by Sandra, who lived elsewhere in the building with the children. Most of the time when Caesar and Angelo visited, they would find Sherman wrapped in his bathrobe sitting on the couch, listening to one of dozens of cassette tapes that Sandra had recorded of the children talking and playing with each other. There were four speakers in the living room that stood three feet high, and he enjoyed playing those cassettes so loud that the noise of the children made it sound like a playground with a hundred children. Now and again, one child would hit the other or say something mean and there would be a fit of crying on the tape. Sherman would jump up and speed the tape past the crying to a place where the talking and playing resumed.
The apartment, despite the noise, became another home for Caesar and he began going there without Angelo after school. Before long, he was leaving home at least two or three days a week and going not to school but straight to Sherman’s place, where he’d drop his books at the door beside the two-foot-high porcelain bulldog and make a place for himself in front of the television. In the beginning, he was able to get back home in the evening before his father arrived from work. But as the months wore away to winter, to spring, he was getting home later and later.
One night in April, Sherman dropped him off about three in the morning, and Caesar stood on the sidewalk for a long while looking up at his house. For the first time, all the lights in the house were off. When he opened the front door, his father was standing before him in the darkened hall.
“I’m just slaving away my life to raise up another Angelo,” his father hissed, turning on the hall light. “A goddamn no-account.” As soon as his hand was off the light switch, he slapped Caesar, knocking him back against the front door. Before Caesar could recover, his father had grabbed him by the shirt with one hand, opened the door with the other, and threw him out on the sidewalk.