If It Bleeds Read online

  “Jerome? What are you doing here?” And because she can’t help it: “And drinking Coke at seven-thirty in the morning, oough!”

  “I’m going with you,” he says, and the look he gives her says that arguing will do no good. That’s okay, because she doesn’t want to.

  “Thanks, Jerome,” Holly says. It’s hard, but she manages not to cry. “That’s very good of you.”

  3

  Jerome drives the first half of the journey, and at the gas-and-pee stop on the turnpike, they switch. Holly feels her sense of dread at what’s awaiting her (us, she corrects herself) starting to close in as they get closer to the Cleveland suburb of Covington. To keep it at bay, she asks Jerome how his project is going. His book.

  “Of course, if you don’t want to talk about it, I know some authors don’t—”

  But Jerome is willing enough. It began as a required assignment for a class called Sociology in Black and White. Jerome decided to write about his great-great-grandfather, born of former slaves in 1878. Alton Robinson spent his childhood and early adulthood in Memphis, where a thriving black middle class existed in the latter years of the nineteenth century. When yellow fever and white vigilante gangs struck at that nicely balanced sub-economy, much of the black community simply pulled up stakes, leaving the white folks they’d worked for to cook their own food, dispose of their own garbage, and wipe their own babies’ beshitted bottoms.

  Alton settled in Chicago, where he worked in a meat-packing plant, saved his money, and opened a juke joint two years before Prohibition. Rather than close down when “the biddies started busting the barrels” (this from a letter Alton wrote to his sister—Jerome has found a trove of letters and documents in storage), he changed locations and opened a South Side speakeasy that became known as the Black Owl.

  The more Jerome discovered about Alton Robinson—his dealings with Alphonse Capone, his three escapes from assassination (the fourth did not go so well), his probable sideline in blackmail, his political kingmaking—the more his paper grew, and the more his work for other classes seemed insignificant in comparison. He turned the long essay in and received a laudatory grade.

  “Which was sort of a joke,” he tells Holly as they roll into the last fifty miles of their journey. “That paper was just, you know, the tip of the iceberg. Or like the first verse in one of those endless English ballads. But by then I was halfway through spring semester, and I had to pick up the slack in my other courses. Make the mater and pater proud, you know.”

  “That was very adult of you,” says the woman who feels she never succeeded in making her mother and late father proud. “But it must have been hard.”

  “It was hard,” Jerome says. “I was on fire, kiddo. Wanted to drop everything else and chase great-great-Grandpa Alton. That man had a fabulous life. Diamonds and pearl stickpins and a mink coat. But letting it age a little was the right thing to do. When I went back to it—this was last June—I saw how it had a theme, or could have, if I did the job right. Have you ever read The Godfather?”

  “Read the book, saw the movie,” Holly says promptly. “All three movies.” She feels compelled to add, “The last one isn’t very good.”

  “Do you remember the epigraph of the novel?”

  She shakes her head.

  “It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.”

  “It really is like The Godfather,” Holly marvels, but Jerome shakes his head.

  “It’s not, because black people can never be American in the same way Italian and Irish people can. Black skin withstands the melting pot. I want to say . . .” He pauses. “I want to say that discrimination is the father of crime. I want to say that Alton Robinson’s tragedy was that he thought that through crime he could achieve some sort of equality, and that turned out to be a chimera. In the end he wasn’t killed because he got crossways with Paulie Ricca, who was Capone’s successor, but because he was black. Because he was a nigger.”

  Jerome, who used to irritate Bill Hodges (and scandalize Holly) by sometimes doing a minstrel show colored accent—all yassuh boss and I sho do, suh!—spits this last word.

  “Do you have a title?” Holly asks quietly. They are nearing the Covington exit.

  “I think so, yeah. But I didn’t think it up.” Jerome looks embarrassed. “Listen, Hollyberry, if I tell you something, do you promise to keep it secret? From Pete, and from Barb and my parents? Especially them.”

  “Of course. I can keep a secret.”

  Jerome knows this is true, but still hesitates for a moment before plunging. “My prof in that Black and White sociology class sent my paper to an agent in New York. Elizabeth Austin is her name. She was interested, so after Thanksgiving I sent her the hundred or so pages I’ve written since summer. Ms. Austin thinks it’s publishable, and not just by an academic press, which was about as high as I was shooting. She thinks one of the majors might be interested. She suggested calling it by the name of great-great-Gramp’s speakeasy. Black Owl: The Rise and Fall of an American Gangster.”

  “Jerome, that’s wonderful! I bet tons of people would be interested in a book with a title like that.”

  “Black people, you mean.”

  “No! All kinds! Do you think only white people liked The Godfather?” Then a thought strikes her. “Only how would your family feel about it?” She’s thinking of her own family, which would be horrified to have such a skeleton dragged out of the closet.

  “Well,” Jerome says, “they both read the paper and loved it. Of course, that’s different from a book, isn’t it? One that might be read by a lot more people than a teacher. But it’s four generations back, after all . . .”

  Jerome sounds troubled. She sees him look at her, but only out of the corner of her eye; Holly always faces directly forward when she’s driving. Those movie sequences where the driver looks at his passenger for seconds at a time while delivering dialogue drive her absolutely crazy. She always wants to shout, Look at the road, dummy! Do you want to hit a kid while you’re discussing your love life?

  “What do you think, Hols?”

  She considers this carefully. “I think you should show your parents as much as you showed the agent,” she says at last. “Listen to what they say. Get a read on their feelings and respect them. Then . . . push ahead. Write it all down—the good, the bad, and the ugly.” They’ve come to the Covington exit. Holly puts on her blinker. “I’ve never written a book, so I can’t say for sure, but I think it takes a certain amount of bravery. So that’s what you should do, I think. Be brave.”

  And that’s what I need to be now, she thinks. Home is only two miles away, and home is where the heartache is.

  4

  The Gibney house is in a development called Meadowbrook Estates. As Holly weaves her way through the spiderweb of streets (to the home of the spider, she thinks, and is immediately ashamed of thinking about her mother that way), Jerome says, “If I lived here and came home drunk, I’d probably spend at least an hour finding the right house.”

  He’s right. They’re New England saltboxes, only set apart from one another by different colors . . . which wouldn’t be much help at night, even with the streetlights. There are probably different flowerbeds in the warm months, but now the yards of Meadowbrook Estates are covered in crusty scarves of old snow. Holly could tell Jerome that her mother likes the sameness, it makes her feel safe (Charlotte Gibney has her own issues), but doesn’t. She’s gearing up for what promises to be a stressful lunch and an even more stressful afternoon. Moving day, she thinks. Oh God.

  She pulls into the driveway of 42 Lily Court, kills the engine, and turns to Jerome. “You need to be prepared. Mother says he’s gotten a lot worse in the last few weeks. Sometimes she exaggerates, but I don’t think she is this time.”

  “I understand the situation.” He gives one of her hands a brief squeeze. “I’ll be fine. Y
ou just take care of yourself, okay?”

  Before she can reply, the door of Number 42 opens and Charlotte Gibney comes out, still in her good church clothes. Holly raises one hand in a tentative hello gesture, which Charlotte doesn’t return.

  “Come inside,” she says. “You’re late.”

  Holly knows she’s late. By five minutes.

  As they approach the door, Charlotte gives Jerome a what’s-he-doing-here look.

  “You know Jerome,” Holly says. It’s true; they’ve met half a dozen times, and Charlotte always favors him with that same look. “He came to keep me company, and lend moral support.”

  Jerome gives Charlotte his most charming smile. “Hello, Mrs. Gibney. I invited myself along. Hope you don’t mind.”

  To this Charlotte simply says, “Come in, I’m freezing out here.” As though it had been their idea for her to come out on the stoop rather than her own.

  Number 42, where Charlotte has lived with her brother since her husband died, is overheated and smelling so strongly of potpourri that Holly hopes she won’t begin coughing. Or gagging, which would be even worse. There are four side tables in the little hall, narrowing the passage to the living room enough to make the trip perilous, especially since each table is crammed with the little china figurines that are Charlotte’s passion: elves, gnomes, trolls, angels, clowns, bunnies, ballerinas, doggies, kitties, snowmen, Jack and Jill (with a bucket each), and the pièce de la résistance, a Pillsbury Doughboy.

  “Lunch is on the table,” Charlotte says. “Just fruit cup and cold chicken, I’m afraid—but there’s cake for dessert—and . . . and . . .”

  Her eyes fill with tears, and when Holly sees them, she feels—in spite of all the work she’s done in therapy—a surge of resentment that’s close to hate. Maybe it is hate. She thinks of all the times she cried in her mother’s presence and was told to go to her room “until you get that out of your system.” She feels an urge to throw those very words in her mother’s face now, but gives Charlotte an awkward hug instead. As she does, she feels how close the bones lie under that thin and flabby flesh, and realizes her mother is old. How can she dislike an old woman who so obviously needs her help? The answer seems to be quite easily.

  After a moment Charlotte pushes Holly away with a little grimace, as though she smelled something bad. “Go see your uncle and tell him lunch is ready. You know where he is.”

  Indeed Holly does. From the living room comes the sound of professionally excited announcers doing a football pregame show. She and Jerome go single-file, so as not to risk upsetting any members of the china gallery.

  “How many of these does she have?” Jerome murmurs.

  Holly shakes her head. “I don’t know. She always liked them, but it’s gotten out of hand since my father died.” Then, lifting her voice and making it artificially bright: “Hi, Uncle Henry! All ready for lunch?”

  Uncle Henry clearly didn’t make the run to church. He’s slumped in his La-Z-Boy, wearing a Purdue sweatshirt with some of his breakfast egg on it, and a pair of jeans, the kind with the elasticized waist. They are riding low, showing a pair of boxer shorts with tiny blue pennants on them. He looks from the TV to his visitors. For a moment he’s totally blank, then he smiles. “Janey! What are you doing here?”

  That goes through Holly like a glass dagger, and her mind flashes momentarily to Chet Ondowsky, with his scratched hands and torn suit coat pocket. And why would it not? Janey was her cousin, bright and vivacious, all the things Holly could never be, and she was Bill Hodges’s girlfriend for awhile, before she died in another explosion, victim of a bomb planted by Brady Hartsfield and meant for Bill himself.

  “It’s not Janey, Uncle Henry.” Still with that artificial brightness, the kind usually saved for cocktail parties. “It’s Holly.”

  There’s another of those blank pauses as rusty relays go about business they used to do lickety-split. Then he nods. “Sure. It’s my eyes, I guess. From looking at the TV too long.”

  His eyes, Holly thinks, are hardly the point. Janey is years in her grave. That’s the point.

  “Come here, girl, and give me a hug.”

  She does so, as briefly as possible. When she pulls back, he’s staring at Jerome. “Who’s this . . .” For a terrible moment she thinks he’s going to finish by saying this black boy or maybe even this jigaboo, but he doesn’t. “This guy? I thought you were seeing that cop.”

  This time she doesn’t bother to correct him about who she is. “It’s Jerome. Jerome Robinson. You’ve met him before.”

  “Have I? Mind must be going.” He says it not even as a joke, just as a kind of conversational placeholder, without realizing that’s exactly the case.

  Jerome shakes his hand. “How you doing, sir?”

  “Not bad for an old fella,” Uncle Henry says, and before he can say more, Charlotte calls—practically shrieks—from the kitchen that lunch is on.

  “His master’s voice,” Henry says good-humoredly, and when he stands up, his pants fall down. He doesn’t seem to realize.

  Jerome gives Holly a tiny jerk of the head toward the kitchen. She gives him a doubtful look in return, but goes.

  “Let me just help you with those,” Jerome says. Uncle Henry doesn’t reply but only stares at the TV with his hands dangling at his sides while Jerome pulls up his pants. “There you go. Ready to eat?”

  Uncle Henry looks at Jerome, startled, as if just registering his presence. Which is probably true. “I don’t know about you, son,” he says.

  “Don’t know what about me, sir?” Jerome asks, taking Uncle Henry by the shoulder and getting him turned toward the kitchen.

  “The cop was too old for Janey, but you look too young.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t know.”

  5

  They get through lunch, with Charlotte scolding Uncle Henry along and sometimes helping him with his food. Twice she leaves the table and comes back wiping her eyes. Through analysis and therapy, Holly has come to realize that her mother is almost as terrified of life as Holly herself used to be, and that her most unpleasant characteristics—her need to criticize, her need to control situations—arise from that fear. Here is a situation she can’t control.

  And she loves him, Holly thinks. That, too. He’s her brother, she loves him, and now he’s leaving. In more ways than one.

  When lunch is finished, Charlotte banishes the men to the living room (“Watch your game, boys,” she tells them) while she and Holly do up the few dishes. As soon as they are alone, Charlotte tells Holly to have her friend move her car so they can get Henry’s out of the garage. “His things are in the trunk, all packed and ready to go.” She’s speaking out of the corner of her mouth like an actress in a bad spy movie.

  “He thinks I’m Janey,” Holly says.

  “Of course he does, Janey was always his favorite,” Charlotte says, and Holly feels another of those glass daggers go in.

  6

  Charlotte Gibney might not have been pleased to see Holly’s friend turn up with her daughter, but she’s more than willing to allow Jerome to pilot Uncle Henry’s big old boat of a Buick (125,000 miles on the clock) to the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center, where a room has been waiting since the first of December. Charlotte was hoping her brother could remain at home through Christmas, but now he’s begun to wet the bed, which is bad, and to wander the neighborhood, sometimes in his bedroom slippers, which is worse.

  When they arrive, Holly doesn’t see a single rolling hill in the vicinity, just a Wawa store and a decrepit bowling alley across the street. A man and a woman in blue Care Center jackets are leading a line of six or eight golden oldies back from the bowling alley, the man holding up his hands to stop traffic until the group is safely across. The inmates (not the right word, but it’s the one that occurs to her) are holding hands, making them look like prematurely aged children on a field trip.

  “Is this the movies?” Uncle Henry asks as Jerome wheels the Buick into the turnaround in front of the
Care Center entrance. “I thought we were going to the movies.”

  He’s riding shotgun. At the house, he actually tried to get in behind the wheel until Charlotte and Holly got him turned around. No more driving for Uncle Henry. Charlotte filched her brother’s driver’s license from his wallet in June, during one of Henry’s increasingly long naps. Then sat at the kitchen table and cried over it.

  “I’m sure they’ll have movies here,” Charlotte says. She’s smiling, and biting her lip as she does it.

  They are met in the lobby by a Mrs. Braddock, who treats Uncle Henry like an old friend, grasping both of his hands and telling him how glad she is “to have you with us.”

  “With us for what?” Henry asks, looking around. “I have to go to work soon. The paperwork is all messed up. That Hellman is worse than useless.”

  “Do you have his things?” Mrs. Braddock asks Charlotte.

  “Yes,” Charlotte says, still smiling and biting her lip. Soon she may be crying. Holly knows the signs.

  “I’ll get his suitcases,” Jerome says quietly, but there’s nothing wrong with Uncle Henry’s ears.

  “What suitcases? What suitcases?”

  “We have a very nice room for you, Mr. Tibbs,” Mrs. Braddock says. “Plenty of sunsh—”

  “They call me Mister Tibbs!” Uncle Henry bellows in a very credible Sidney Poitier imitation that makes the young woman at the desk and a passing orderly look around, startled. Uncle Henry laughs and turns to his niece. “How many times did we watch that movie, Holly? Half a dozen?”

  This time he got her name right, which makes her feel even worse. “More,” Holly says, and knows she may soon cry herself. She and her uncle watched a lot of movies together. Janey may have been his favorite, but Holly was his movie-buddy, the two of them sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between them.