All Aunt Hagar's Children

BAD NEIGHBORS

Even before the fracas with Terence Stagg, people all along both sides of the 1400 block of 8th Street, N.W., could see the Benningtons for what they really were. First, the family moved in not on Saturday or on a weekday, but on Sunday, which was still the Lord’s Day even though church for many was now only a place to visit for a wedding, or a funeral. Perhaps Easter or Christmas. And those watching that Sunday, from behind discreetly parted, brocaded curtains and on porches rarely used except to go back and forth into homes, had to wonder why the Bennington family even bothered to bring along most of their furniture. They had a collection of junk that included a stained queen-size mattress, a dining room table with three legs, a mirror with a large missing piece in one corner, and a refrigerator dented on two sides. One neighbor, his second cup of morning coffee in hand, joked to his wife that the Bennington refrigerator probably wouldn’t work without a big block of ice in it to cool things. During the move-in, the half-dressed little Benningtons occupied themselves running to and from the two mediumsize moving trucks, taking in clothes that had busted out of the cardboard boxes during the trip from whatever countrified shack they had left. Over the next two weeks or so, it became clear that the house at 1406 8th, with its three bedrooms, would be containing at least twelve people, though that number was always fluid, so neighbors on both sides of the street would never get a proper accounting, and they would never know who was related to whom.

They came in the middle of October, the Benningtons, bringing children—a bunch of five or so, from a two-year-old to a girl on the verge of being a teenager. Children who sometimes played outside on Friday and Saturday nights until at least nine thirty. And they were loud children, loud in a neighborhood where most of the children were now in their teens and did no more harm than play their portable radios too loudly as they washed their parents’ cars. And the Benningtons came with a few men who sat on the porch on a legless couch with a cheap bedspread, drinking from containers in paper bags. Grace Bennington appeared to be the matriarch; she could have been fifty, but with her broad weight and gray hair, it was difficult for anyone to be certain. On a good day, her 8th Street neighbors might have been able to say forty or forty-five, but on a bad day, and the Benningtons seemed to have not a few bad days, seventy-five would not have been an unfair number. Only one thing was certain—she, in face and body, had known hard work. She moved about on stubby legs, favoring the outsides of her feet as she walked, so that all her shoes had soles run down on those sides. The soles of her shoes on the inside were almost as new as the day she brought them out of the store. There was a man—always bringing groceries—far older than Grace, tallish, a less flashy dresser than most of the men in the rest of the family; he came and went, always in the uniform of a man who worked in the railroad yards. A woman who could have been a bit younger than Grace was rarely seen, and when she was, the children would be holding her hand as they took her for a walk. She wore coats and sweaters even on the warmest day, and that fall and winter saw many good days. She might have been beautiful, but no one could tell because she was always wearing sunglasses and a scarf pulled around to cover most of her face. Then there was Amanda, no more than seventeen, Amanda in her tight blue jeans. The oldest male the neighbors saw most often was Derek, a man in his early twenties, a well-built and too often shirtless loudmouth, who seemed to go off, maybe to some job, whenever he could get his nineteen-year-old Ford to run, the kind of car most of the men in the neighborhood had owned on their way up to where they were now. There were two or three men in that family, but they also came and went. Only Derek was constant.

It was the quietness of Neil Bennington that caused Sharon Palmer—who had noticed in his demeanor even across 8th Street in those first weeks after the clan moved in—to introduce herself to him at his locker in the hall at Cardozo High School. He was in the tenth grade, small for his age and somewhat awkward, unlike his brother Derek. Sharon Palmer, who lived at 1409 directly across 8th from the Benningtons, was to witness the fracas between Derek and Terence Stagg, and seeing the fight, which was actually far less than that, she would begin to think her father and most of their neighbors might not be so wrong about most of those Benningtons. By then she would have had her third date with Terence, and he would have kissed her five times, twice surprising her as he thrust his tongue into her mouth. She mistook what she felt at that moment for blossoming love.

A senior, Sharon had, in the eleventh grade, become aware of her effect on boys—almost all of them (Terence Stagg, whom she had long had eyes and heart for, was a week or so from paying her any attention). And Sharon, coming rather late to an awareness of her womanhood, had begun to take some delight in seeing boys wither as they stood close enough to smell the mystery that had nothing to do with perfume and look into her twinkling brown eyes she had inherited from a grandmother who had seen only the morning, afternoon, and evening of a cotton field.

Neil was bent over into his locker, and when she said Hello, he rose slowly as though he knew all too well the accidents that came with quick movements. He seemed more befuddled than taken with her femaleness after she told him who she was, and the innocence of him made her wish that just this once she could turn down all that mystery that transformed boys into fools. He squinted and blinked, and with each blink he appeared to get closer to knowing just who she was. And as the brief conversation went on, it occurred to her that he was very much like one of her younger brothers—Neil and the brother had the forever look of true believers who had to start every morning learning all over again that the Easter bunny and Santa Claus did not exist.

That day of the first conversation, she saw him walking alone down 11th Street after school and she separated from her friends to go with him the rest of the way home. She thought Neil, like her brother, was adorable, a word she had started using just after the New Year. Her father, Hamilton Palmer, saw them turn the corner from P and thought nothing about it. As the morning and afternoon supervisor at the main post office at North Capitol Street, he was home most days by three thirty. He was watering plants on his porch, and Neil said good-bye to his daughter and Hamilton opened the little gate on the porch that had been installed ages ago when his children and the puppy were too small to know all the ways the world beyond the gate could hurt them.

It was three weeks later, more than a month after the Benningtons moved in, that Sharon’s father Hamilton began to think something might be amiss. Thanksgiving had come and gone, and people all over Washington were complaining that it just didn’t feel like Christmas weather. Who could think of Christmas with people still in their fall sweaters and trees threatening to bud again? Neil and Sharon turned the corner again, this time accompanied by three other students who lived farther down 8th. Before the four left Sharon in front of her house, Hamilton’s daughter touched Neil’s shoulder, and the boy smiled. It was not the touch so much as the smile that bothered him. He had been thinking that his Sharon and Terence Stagg might be a good match some time down the line when they had finished their education. Hamilton noticed for the first time that Derek was watching everything from across the street. He could not tell for certain, but he thought he saw Derek Bennington smirking.

Two days later the Prevosts up the street at 1404 had their place burgled, with a television being the most expensive thing taken. No one said anything, but the neighbors knew it had to be Derek. The next week the Thorntons at 1414 had their car stolen. The car was only a Chevy. Five years old, but that was not the point, said Bill Forsythe at 1408 next door to the Benningtons. His wife, Prudence, had complained about what a noisy heap the Thornton car was and the neighborhood was well rid of it. A man’s property is a man’s property, Bill said, even if it’s one skate with three wheels. After the car was taken, someone called the police and they came out and spoke for some fifteen minutes to the Benningtons in their house. No one knew what went down, as the police came out and left without talking to any of the neighbors. Derek walked out soon afterward and stood on his porch, smoking a cigarette. He was alone for a good while, and then his mother Grace came and said something that made him put out the cigarette in the ashtray. She continued talking to him, and for every second she was speaking, he was nodding his head slightly.

More than a month before the January fracas between Derek and Terence Stagg, Sharon Palmer returned to Neil a book she had borrowed from him. It was a Saturday afternoon, and she went up the steps to the Bennington home at 1406 and saw that the screen door was shut but that the main door was open. There was no one she could see from the threshold and she called “Hello” and “Neil,” and then, with no answer after moments, she knocked on the wood of the screen door. The radio and the television were playing. She did not want to think it, but she felt it said something about them, maybe not Neil but all the rest of them. She waited about two minutes and after she again called for Neil, she opened the screen and stepped into the house, saying “Hello, hello, hello” all the way. On the couch the woman in the sunglasses was watching her, and when Sharon asked for Neil, the woman said nothing. There were two small children on either side of her and they were watching a black-and-white television. Sharon immediately thought about the Prevosts’ television, but she did not know if it had been color or black-and-white.

“I knocked, but I got no answer,” Sharon said. “Is Neil here? I brought his book back.” The woman tilted her head to the side as though to better consider what she had heard. “Is he here?” The children were silent and their eyes were big as though Sharon was a creature they had not seen before. Sharon told the woman again that she was looking for Neil. It would be better, Sharon thought, if I could see her eyes. Finally, the woman moved her face toward the next room. “Thank you.”

The dining room was crowded with boxes, the state it must have been in since the first day they moved in. The dining table’s missing leg had been replaced with one that had yet to be painted the color of the rest of the table.

“Hello, Neil? Neil?” She stepped into the kitchen, and she was not prepared for what she saw. It was immaculate, the kind of room her mother would be happy with. “Hello?” The floor was clean, the counters were clean, the stove was clean, the tiny table and its three chairs were clean. “Hello?” She turned and looked about the room with great curiosity. When she turned back, Derek was standing at the open screen door to the backyard, watching her.

“You lost?”

“No, I’m sorry. I knocked but no one answered.”

“The May maid swayed away to pray in the day’s hay,” Derek said, not smiling. “Thas why you got no answer.”

“I just came to return Neil’s book. Is he here?”

Derek shouted twice for Neil. “Well, you can just leave it on the table, lady from across the street.”

“He said I could borrow another. A book of Irish stories the library doesn’t seem to have.”

He shouted for Neil again, and as she listened to his voice thunder through the house, she noticed the small bookcase beside the refrigerator. Four shelves, each a little more than two feet across. He saw her looking at it. “Just leave it on the table. That readin fool’ll get it.”

“I can come back for it another time.” She set the book on the table.

“Which one was it?” He was wearing an undershirt, and it hung on him in a way that did not threaten the way those shirts seemed to on other men. The bare muscular arms were simply bare muscular arms, not possible weapons. It was a small moment in the kitchen, but she was to think of those arms years later as she stood naked and looked down at the bare arms of her husband as the red light of the expensive German clock shone down on him. A night-light.

“A book of stories—Mary Lavin’s Tales from Bective Bridge. My teacher shared two with me and I’m hooked.”

“Hooked is good cept with junk, ask any junkie,” Derek said, and he looked across at the bookcase. “The almighty reader might have it upstairs or in some box somewhere. His shit is all over the fuckin place.” Shit, fuckin, she thought. Shit, fuckin. In a few quiet, swift steps, he was at the table. He took up the book and looked at the spine and wrinkled his face. “Hooked, hooked,” he said. The same kind of steps took him to the bookcase. He knelt, peered for a moment, and put the book between two green books on the second shelf up from the bottom. “L is for Lavin,” Derek said and found the book. “M is for Mary.” He looked at it front and back. “I know one thing for sure: He loves this woman’s work so you bet not lose it. I think the almighty reader is part Irish and don’t know it yet.” In two more steps he was before her, and she took the book and promised to return it just as it was. There was nothing untoward in his face, the lust, the hunger, the way it was in all the boys except Neil, boys with pimples, and boys without. There was no smile from him and he did not look into her eyes, the twinkling and the brown. He turned and went to the refrigerator and opened it. “You know,” he said, his back to her, his head bent to look in, and the light of the refrigerator pouring out over him, “you shouldn’t be afraid of wearin blue.” He took out a beer and closed the icebox with great care. “Forget the red. You wear too much red.” He did not turn around but found on the counter beside the icebox an opener for the beer.

“What?”

Neil came in, and Derek pointed to him. “Where you been, boy?” Derek said. “Your girlfriend been waitin. You the worse fuckin boyfriend in the world.”

“She ain’t my girlfriend,” Neil said and raised his hand Hello to Sharon.

“I gave your girlfriend one of Lavin’s books, man.”

“I told you she’s not my girlfriend, Dee.”

“Whatever, man.” He still had not turned around and he drank from the beer as he walked to the back door. “You should tell your girlfriend that red doesn’t suit her. She ain’t believe me so maybe if it comes from her boyfriend.” He went out the screen door, and Neil walked her back to the front of the house.

Three neighbors saw Sharon Palmer leave the Bennington house that day—her father Hamilton from his upstairs bedroom, Terence Stagg next door to the home of Sharon and Hamilton Palmer, and Prudence Forsythe next to the Benningtons. This was a little more than a month before that January thing between Terence and Derek. Terence was standing at his living room window and watched Sharon walk down the Bennington steps with a book in her hand. Neil Bennington was a wisp of a boy, not worth noticing to a young man like Terence. But Terence had seen Derek about, and like most of the men on 8th Street he didn’t think much of him; men like Derek had never seen the inside of Howard University, where Terence was in his second year, and they never would. As Sharon waited for the few passing cars going up and down 8th, she lowered her head in a most engaging way, lowered it only for a second, as if to consider something, and Terence could see how Sharon had filled out. Filled out in her pink sweater and her blue jeans not trampy tight, but tight enough to let a man know if he should bother or not. She had filled out since the last time he had really taken a look at her, and that was a time he could not remember.

Terence was at her door that evening, asking a beaming Hamilton Palmer, who had also gone to Howard, how he was doing these warm days and then asking the father if he might talk a bit with his daughter this evening. He and Sharon stepped out onto the porch and Terence invited her to a movie and a meal on Friday night. She had had two dates before—and one of those had been with a young man who was brother to her cousin’s husband. Sharon was not one to keep a diary, but if she had been, the meeting of a few minutes with Terence would have taken up at least two pages.

Terence stepped back into her house and called good-bye to Hamilton Palmer, who came out of the kitchen with Sharon’s mother. The parents said they hadn’t seen much of him lately and then wanted to know how his studies were going and Terence told them they were going very well and that he was hitting his stride. He was, in fact, going with a fellow Howard student, but Howard students not D.C. natives were taught from day one never to venture into Washington neighborhoods except where they could find a better class of people, meaning white people for the most part, and so that Newark girl would never know about 8th Street. That girl at Howard was so clingy, with her Terence this and her Terence that. And as he had watched Sharon earlier come across 8th, he remembered something his father Lane had recently told him: You are young and the world is your oyster. You shuck it, don’t let it shuck you. What oyster would Derek ever shuck? Well, fine, Hamilton said about Terence hitting his stride, and Hamilton came across the living room with his hand extended. And he added that Terence was way ahead of the game, because Lord knows he didn’t hit his own stride until he was a junior at least, isn’t that right, honey? And his wife just smiled.

Sharon, ecstatic, did not get to Mary Lavin’s Tales from Bective Bridge that evening as she had planned. She could think of nothing else but an evening with Terence. She tried sleeping, but found it was no use and so got up from bed and sat in the dark at her window, which, like the one in her parents’ bedroom, faced 8th Street. She would be at the window three nights before Christmas, near about midnight, when she saw Neil Bennington, carrying a small package that was bright even in the dark, dash across the street to her house, take the steps two at a time, and then dash back across the street to his place, his hands now apparently empty. It would be a rare cold night for that December, and she was tempted not to go downstairs. But she did. She opened the main door to find a small gift-wrapped package on the threshold between the door and the storm door. It had her name on it. With anxious fingers, just inside the living room, she tore open the shiny wrapping and found in a velvet-covered box a figure of brown wood, nearly perfectly carved, a figure of a little girl no more than an inch and a half, in a dress that came down to her feet. She had on a bonnet. When Sharon held the figure to the light of the lamp on a table in the living room, the girl’s nose told her unmistakably that the figure was of a black girl. The child seemed somehow recognizable, but for years she was never able to recall where she had seen it. One of the girl’s arms was extended somewhat, and there was a bracelet on it. Through the bracelet ran a gold-like chain; that the chain was shining told it might be gold, that it was from a boy of no means from across the street told her that it might not be.

She was disappointed because she did not want Neil to think that there could ever be anything between them, and such a thing, with such intricacy, with a compellingly quiet beauty, told her that was what he was thinking. But she did not want to hurt his feelings by returning the gift. Adorable people should not be hurt. She thought for a day and decided to give him a book, and she chose a small paperback edition of Ann Petry’s The Street. She came up to him as he stood at his locker at school, his head cocked to the side as if he was trying to decide what was needed for the final period of the day. Terence was picking her up after school. Neil Bennington seemed genuinely surprised. “I didn’t get you anything,” he said, blushing and blinking. “This is straight-up embarrassin.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Sharon said. “It’s the season for giving. What are neighbors for?”

“I’ll get you somethin, I promise,” he said, biting his lip.

“If you do, I’ll think you’ll be trying to reciprocate, and you’ll hurt my feelings.”

“All right,” Neil said. “All right, but I won’t forget this. Ever.”

In more than three years after that day, on her way to becoming a nurse, she would attend a party at the home of one of her Georgetown University professors. Her husband would not be able to be with her that night, but that was the way it had become. She would spend a good part of the evening near a corner with a glass of ginger ale; none of the food would appeal to her. Just as she was about to excuse herself and leave, a white woman of some seventy years would come up to her.

“I have been admiring that wondrous thing you’re wearing,” the white woman said. “Even from across the room, you can see how unique it is.” She looked closer. “The carver must have used up all his eyesight making it. You have exquisite taste.” The woman smiled, not at Sharon but at the Christmas gift that she would only recently have unearthed from a trunk in her parents’ basement.

“It’s not much. Someone gave it to me. It isn’t very much.”

“It is much in that other way,” the woman said. “I know a place down on F Street that would give you five hundred dollars for it…. Please. May I?” and the woman raised a tentative hand, and Sharon nodded and the woman took up the little girl in the bonnet and rested it between her fingers and then looked fully into Sharon’s eyes. “If the carver lost his sight, he may well have thought it was well worth it.” That evening, for the first time, Sharon would notice the initials down in one of the folds of the girl’s dress. No, she said to herself, I would not sell it. I don’t even know if the carver is living anymore.

It was actually Amanda Bennington who first got into it with Terence Stagg, which led to something that ultimately allowed the whole neighborhood to see the Benningtons for what they were. She and her brother Derek had come from the Safeway late on a Saturday morning in mid-January. They parked in front of the Staggs’ house, across the street at 1407. Derek took bags of groceries into their house while Amanda looked to be tidying up the car.

Sharon Palmer was watching from her bedroom next door to the Staggs’. Nothing had really been spoken, but it might as well have been said that she and Terence Stagg were a couple. Neighbors all said what a nice couple they made; she and Terence had driven up in his father’s Cadillac one evening the week before and she saw Neil watching from his porch. She waved and he waved back. They were not walking home as much as they had been, but they still shared books. Derek came out and stood beside Neil as Terence walked Sharon into her house.

Terence, that Saturday morning, was heading out his door when he saw Amanda fussing around in the trunk of Derek’s Ford, which was parked in the same spot his father, Lane Stagg, had been parking his Cadillacs in since even before Terence knew what good things life had in store for him. It may as well be said that his father owned that dot of public real estate. Before his family had awakened, Lane had gone out on an errand that morning, purring quietly away about seven thirty in that new tan Cadillac that had less than three thousand miles on it.

“Hey, you,” Terence said to Amanda and came down the steps to the sidewalk, too upset to even take full notice of her behind as she bent over and puttered in the trunk. He was to excel in anatomy and dermatology when he got to Howard’s medical school, but genetics and neurology would nearly cost him his future. Amanda took her head out of the trunk, holding jumper cables, and looked Terence up and down. “Hey! You know you parked in my father’s space?” Then, watching Amanda toss the cables back in the trunk and try to clean the dirt from her hands with a Kleenex she pulled from her back pocket, he pointed to the space her car was in and said: “Hey, do you know that you are parked in my father’s space?” Since the first month at Howard as a freshman, he had stopped referring to Lane as “my daddy” when talking to a third party.

“Hay for horses, not for people. Go down Hecht’s and get em cheaper,” Amanda said. Words of a child of eight or nine, and they upset Terence even more. “It’s a free country, man,” Amanda said. “We all got a right to park where we wanna park.” She pulled another bunched-up Kleenex from the back pocket of her jeans and tried to wipe her hands with it. She was dark and pretty, and in another universe Terence would have been able to appreciate that. “And besides”—she turned and pointed with the hand with the Kleenex across the street—“somebody’s got my brother’s regular spot.” The Forsythes at 1408 next door to the Benningtons were already fed up with them and showed it by parking in front of their house as often as they could, though the Benningtons had never complained. That Saturday, the Forsythes had company from out of town and the visitors’ Trans Am was where Derek’s Ford would have gone, on a spot covered in oil that was forever leaking from his car. “We had stuff to take and it whatn’t no use parkin way down at the corner. Maybe that Trans Am’ll move before your daddy gets back.”

“I don’t care about that,” Terence said. “You’re just going to have to move that thing somewhere else.”

Her mother Grace had been trying to teach her to control her temper, but Amanda knew there were days and then there were days. “First off,” Amanda said, “I ain’t movin shit. Second off, it ain’t no thing. It’s a classic. Third off, you better get out my damn face. This a free country, man. You ain’t no fuckin parkin police.” She closed the trunk with both hands to make the loudest sound she could manage.

“I would expect something like this from trash like you.”

She flicked the Kleenex at him and he dodged it. “Since it’s that way, you the biggest trash around here.” She had seen him about many times, and in another universe before that moment she would have liked him to come across the street and knock at her door and invite her to the Broadway on 7th Street for a movie and a hamburger and soda afterward. She had also seen Terence’s well-dressed mother, Helen Stagg, quite often as well, had studied the woman as she came out of her house and looked up and down 8th Street as if waiting for the world to tell her that it was once again worthy of having her. She loved her own mother, in all her dowdiness, more than any human being, but she knew Grace would never be Helen Stagg. “If I’m trash, you trash.”

“Typical,” Terence said. “Real damn typical.”

“Whas up here?” Derek came across the street, his keys in his hand.

“Derek, this guy say we gotta move the car cause his father’s got the spot.”

“Ain’t nobody own no parkin spot, neighbor. This a free country, neighbor,” Derek said, the keys jingling with his arm at his side.

“I’m not your neighbor.”

“Oh, oh, it’s like that, huh?” Derek said, turning around twice and raising his arms in faux surrender. “You one of those, huh? All right.” Amanda had stayed in the street behind the car but Derek had continued on up to the sidewalk. “All right, big shot. Les just clear the way, cause I don’t want no trouble. Nobody want any trouble.” He stepped back into the gutter. “All I can say is we got a right to be there, as much right as your daddy and that Cadillac of his with that punk-ass color.” He looked at Amanda. “You done?”

“Yeah, I’m cool.”

“Well, les go,” and they waited to cross as two cars passed going up 8th Street.

“I told you to move that damn thing,” Terence said. His knuckles tapped the top of the trunk. “You people should learn to wash your ears out.” Terence spat on the car.

Derek turned. “Just leave that somebitch alone, Derek,” Amanda said. “He ain’t worth it.”

Grace Bennington came out of her house and yelled at Derek to come on in. Neil stood beside her and he held the hand of a girl of seven or eight. “Wipe that shit off,” Derek said of the spit, a slow-moving blob on the black paint heading down toward the fender. The car didn’t always run, but he kept it clean.

Derek counted all the way to ten and Terence said, “Tell your funky mother to wipe it off.”

“Even you, even poor you,” Derek said calmly, “should know the law against sayin somethin like that. Man oh man oh man…”

It took but one hit to the lower part of the jaw to send Terence to the ground. He had seen the fist coming, but because he had not been in very many fights in his life, it took him far too long to realize the fist was coming for him. Grace and Amanda screamed. The Bryants at 1401 and the Prevosts at 1404 came out, as did the Forsythes and their company who had the Trans Am, all of them still digesting their breakfast. Sharon Palmer had watched with growing concern from her bedroom window. She had not been able to hear all that was said by the three, but, on the path to love, she had admired the way Terence seemed to be standing up to Derek. By the time she got downstairs and out to the sidewalk, Amanda and Grace were comforting Terence, and only seconds after he awoke and saw the women, he told them to get the fuck away from him. Neil was holding his little sister by the hand to keep her from going into the street to be with their mother, and Derek was already back across the street and on the legless couch, watching the group around Terence and smoking a cigarette and waiting for the police to show up.

Lane Stagg was more disturbed about what had happened to his son than if it had been a mere fight between young men of equal age and status, and his Terence had simply lost after doing his best. No doubt, Lane Stagg knew, men like Derek Bennington had never learned to fight fair. Terence, after the trip from the hospital, was out of it for a day and a half, but his father did not need to hear from his son that he had been jumped before he could properly defend himself. Terence suffered no permanent damage, and he would recover and become the first person anyone in the neighborhood knew to become a doctor. “Let them crackers,” Lane Stagg said at the graduation dinner after his second drink, “write that up in their immigration brochures about how descendants of slaves aren’t any good and so all you hardworking immigrants just come on over.”

The police came out that Saturday, but because they didn’t like doing paperwork and because no white person had been hurt, Derek was not arrested. That would not be the case with the white man in Arlington who owned the Bennington home.

That Saturday evening, after the hospital visit, Lane, working on his second drink, broached the idea again of buying the house the Benningtons were renting from the white man. He sat in his living room with his wife perched on the arm of his easy chair, and across from him, on the couch, were Hamilton Palmer, Arthur Atwell, and Bill and Prudence Forsythe. Just after the third sip of that drink, Lane Stagg started in on how the neighborhood was changing for the worse. And Hamilton, already seeing the Staggs as future in-laws, agreed. He was not drinking. And neither was Bill Forsythe. Prudence had quietly come upon Bill two weeks before looking out their bedroom window at Amanda Bennington collecting toys from her front yard. Prudence watched him for more than five minutes before going to see what had captured him. Bill had a drink in his hand and Amanda was wearing the tight blue jeans she would have on the day of the fracas and it was not even one thirty. “Nice day,” Bill said to his wife, already drifting toward happy land and so unable to compose something better. “I’m fucking tired of you getting ideas,” Prudence said. “I’m fucking tired of you and your ideas.” “Honey,” Bill said, “keep your voice down. The neighbors, honey. The neighbors.” Meaning not the Benningtons on one side, but Arthur and Beatrice Atwell on the other side. She took the drink from Bill, and Prudence did it in such a way that the ice cubes did not clink against the sides of the glass.

Lane Stagg, pained about his Terence, was as eloquent that evening as he would be at the last meeting of the neighbors years later. He said that though the prior neighbors in the Bennington house had not been in the same league as those sitting now in his living room, the good neighbors of 8th Street could live with them. But he had to admit that the building had really not housed the proper sort of folk in years. “What,” he asked, “does that white man across the river in Arlington care about our neighborhood?” He had been the captain of his debating team in high school when the schools had such things. He would have made a good lawyer, everyone said. But the son of a coal and ice man rose only so far. His wife, whose father and mother were lawyers, married him anyway.

It was not a long meeting, but before it ended, they agreed that they would raise the money to buy the house from the white man who lived across the Potomac River in Arlington. The white man and his family had been the last whites to live in that neighborhood. “Come on over to Arlington,” his white former neighbors kept saying, “the blacks are all off in that neighborhood so you hardly ever see them.” The white man and his wife had a son, deep into puberty, and the son was growing ever partial to blondes, which 8th Street didn’t grow anymore.

So the good neighbors of 8th Street decided to raise the money and buy the house and rent it to more agreeable people. “Let’s drink to that,” Lane said and stood up. About then Sharon Palmer came down from upstairs where she had been comforting Terence. The medicine had finally overcome him and he had fallen asleep. “Thank you, sweet Sharon, thank you, thank you,” Lane said and he sat his drink on the table beside his chair and put his arms around her. “It was the least I could do,” she said. “It was the very least.”

After everyone had left, and his wife had gone to bed, Lane sat beside his son’s bed. He had enjoyed that house for a long time, and it saddened him, beyond the effects of the liquor, to think that he would not see his grandchildren enjoy it. He loved Washington, and as he sat and watched Terence sleep, he feared he would have to leave. He was hearing good things about Prince George County, but that place, abutting the even more redneck areas of the Maryland suburbs, was not home like D.C. He had heard, too, that the police there were brutes, straight out of the worst Southern town, but he had come a long way since the boyhood days of helping his father deliver coal and ice throughout Washington. Dirty nigger coal man and his dirty nigger coal son, children had called them. And that was in the colored neighborhoods of maids and shoe shiners and janitors and cooks and elevator operators. But he was a thousand lives from that now, even though he wasn’t anybody’s lawyer. With his reputation as a GS 15 at the Labor Department and a wife high up in the D.C. school system and a bigger Maryland house and a son on the way to being a doctor, the police in Prince George would know just what sort he was.

The good neighbors were helped by one major thing—the white man and his wife across the Potomac who owned the Bennington house had been thinking for some time about moving to Florida. Their son, who had no interest in real estate in Washington, was now off to a great start nevertheless—he owned two used car lots, one in Arlington and the other in Alexandria. He had a lovely wife and two children in Great Falls, and he had a mistress in both cities where the car lots were. Of the three blond women, only one had been born blond.

Lane Stagg, Hamilton Palmer, Arthur Atwell, and Prudence Forsythe met with the white man on the highway in Arlington named for Robert E. Lee, in a restaurant that had been segregated less than two years before. They offered him $31,000 for the Bennington house. The white man whistled at the figure. Arthur Atwell was silent, as usual. He was semi-retired and liked to think he had more money than he really did have; his widow, Beatrice, was to discover that when he died not long after that meeting. The white man, Nicholas Riccocelli, whistled again, this time even louder, because the $31,000 sounded good—he really had no idea how much the house was worth. For several moments, he studied a cheap print of a Dutch windmill on the wall beside the table and thought about how many days on a Florida beach $31,000 would provide. That plus the money from some other property and his investments in his son’s businesses.

Riccocelli said give him a week to think it over, and he called Lane Stagg in four days and said they had a deal. The white man had never had any trouble with the Benningtons and so felt he owed it to them to tell them himself, formally, that they would have to move. He came late one Saturday afternoon in early February, and when Derek told him his mother wasn’t home, Riccocelli wanted to know if she would be gone long.

“If there’s something important,” Derek said, “you can tell me.” And when the white man told him that they would have to be gone in two months, Derek turned from his spot in the middle of the living room to look at Amanda and Neil standing in the doorway to the dining room. “Can you believe this shit?” Then to Riccocelli, he asked, “Why? Ain’t we always paid rent on time? Ain’t we?”

“Yes, but the new owners would like to start anew.”

“Who are they?” Derek said. “You tell em we good tenants and everything’ll be all right.”

“I’m afraid,” the white man said, “that will not work. The new owners wish to go in another direction altogether.”

“Who the fuck are these people? What kinda direction you talkin about?” Derek came two steps closer to the man.

“Why…why…” and Riccocelli seemed unable to complete the sentence because he had thought their neighbors would have somehow let the Benningtons know. “Why your neighbors around you.” The man sensed something bad about to happen and backed toward the front door. Where, he wondered, was the mother? She had always seemed so sensible.

“Get the fuck out!” Derek said and grabbed the man by his coat collar. The man opened the door and Derek pushed him out. “You sorry motherfucker!” The woman who always wore sunglasses, seated between two children, began to cry, and the children, following her, began crying as well.

“Derek, leave him alone,” Amanda said. “Leave him be.”

Out on the porch, Derek still had Riccocelli by the collar. He pulled him down the stairs. “Derek!” Amanda shouted. “Please!”

“Don’t hurt me, Mr. Bennington.” The ride over from Arlington had been pleasant enough. Riccocelli was a small man, and his eyes only came about thirteen inches above the dashboard, but he enjoyed driving. There had been gentle and light snow most of the way from Arlington, and a few times he saw lightning across the sky. Snow and lightning, and then the thunder. How could a day go wrong that quickly? He would miss the snow in Florida, he had thought all the way across Key Bridge. Now, as the two men stumbled and fell their way down the steps to the sidewalk, there was rain, also gentle, but the sky was quiet. “You mustn’t molest me, Mr. Bennington.” Riccocelli had parked behind Derek’s Ford, and Derek pushed and half carried him to the car and slammed him against it. “You come back and you dead meat.”

After the man was gone, Derek went up and down both sides of the street, shouting to the neighbors to come out and confront him. “Don’t be punks!” he shouted. As he neared the middle of the other side of 8th, Grace came around the corner, and she and Amanda and Neil, who had been standing in the yard, went to him. “We got babies in that house, man! It’s winter, for Godsakes!” Sharon opened her door and came out on the porch, but she was the only neighbor to do so. “We got sweet innocent babies in that house, man! What can yall be thinkin?” They were able to calm him but before they could get him across the street, the police came.

Arthur Atwell died of a heart attack not long after the Benningtons moved at the end of February, two days before Derek got out of D.C. Jail. Arthur’s widow, Beatrice, found that despite all Arthur had said, there was not much money, and she had to back out of the Bennington house deal. She moved to Claridge Towers on M Street, into an apartment with a bathroom where she could hide when the thunder and lightning came. Everyone was sad to see her leave because she had been a better neighbor than most. Those still in on the Bennington house deal did manage to buy the house, but the good neighbors rarely found their sort of people to rent the place to.

Sharon Palmer Stagg’s car had been in the shop two days when she finished her shift at Georgetown University Hospital one Saturday night in March. It was too late for a bus, and she thought she would have a better chance for a cab at Wisconsin Avenue and so she made her way out of the hospital grounds to P Street. She was not yet a nurse, but did have a part-time job as a nurse’s assistant at the hospital, where she often volunteered on her days off. Just before 36th Street that night, she saw a small group of young men coming toward her, loud, singing a song too garbled for her to understand. She was used to such crowds—Georgetown University students, many with bogus identification cards they used to buy drinks at the bars along Wisconsin Avenue and M Street.

She had been married for nine months. Terence Stagg was in medical school at Howard. His maternal grandparents, the attorneys, had been killed in a car accident by a drunken driver who was himself an attorney, and they had left their only grandchild more money than was good for him. Terence and his wife lived more than well in a part of upper Northwest Washington where the Benningtons could only serve and never live.

Just before Sharon reached 35th Street, the group of young men came under a streetlight and she could see that two of them were white and the third was black. The black one, six or so feet from her, said to the white ones, “I spy with my little eye something good to eat,” and the three spread out and blocked her from passing. “I always have these fantasies about nurses and sponge baths,” the black one said. She was wearing a white uniform and that had told them all they needed to know. They came to within three feet of her and one of the white ones held his arms out to Sharon, while the other two surrounded her. She did not hear the car door behind her open and close.

The black one touched her cheek and then her breasts with both hands and one of the white students did the same, and both young men breathed sour beer into her face. Sharon pulled away, and the two looked at each other and giggled. The third student gave a rah-rah cry and came up and slapped her behind twice. As the black student inhaled deeply for another blast into her face, something punched him in the side of the face and the black student fell hard against a car and passed out. “Hey! Hey!” the white student who had had his hands on Sharon said to the puncher. “Whatcha do to our Rufus?” The puncher pulled Sharon back behind him and she saw that it was a face from a long time ago, and her knees buckled to see it. He may well have been a ghost because she had not seen him in that long a time. “They spoil the best nights we have,” Derek said to her.

The white student who had not touched her pulled out a knife, the blade more than three inches. Derek reached into his own pocket, but before his hand came out, the white student had stabbed him in his left side, through his leather jacket, through his shirt, into the vicinity of his heart, and Sharon screamed as Derek first faltered and then pulled himself up. In a second his switchblade was out and the blade tore through the student’s jacket and into his arm, and the student ran out into P Street and down toward his university. “I wanted to keep this clean,” Derek said. “But white trash won’t let me.”

“Hey! Hey!” the second white student said as he sobered up. “We didn’t mean anything.” He raised his arms high. “See, see…”

“Oh, you fucks always mean somethin,” Derek said, holding his knife to the man’s cheek and flicking it once to open a wound in the cheek, less than two inches from his nostrils. The man crumpled, both hands to his face. His black friend was still out, and the man with the arm wound was shouting as he ran that they were all being killed by niggers. Derek sheathed his knife and returned it to his pocket and then pulled Sharon down the street to his car.

Within moments he had driven them down P, slowly, across Wisconsin and to a spot before the P Street Bridge, where he stopped. He turned on the light and inspected his side. “Shit!” he said. “Bad but maybe not fatal. Damn!”

“Let me help you,” Sharon said.

He started the car up, and after looking in the sideview mirror he continued on down P Street, again slowly. Two patrol cars sped past them, and she watched him watching them go away in the rearview mirror. “Dead or alive, the black dude won’t matter,” he said to the mirror, joining the traffic moving around Dupont Circle. “But them white dudes are princes and the world gon pay for that.” He became part of the flow going up Connecticut Avenue. “And it happened in Georgetown. They’ll make sure somebody pays for that. But they were drunk and so describin might be a problem. Real drunk.” He seemed unaware that she was there. “Thas why I never went to college, Derek. Black people gotta leave all their common sense at the front door. College is the business of miseducatin. Like them people would ever open the door anyway.” She feared he might pass out, and in the near darkness of the car, she was comforted by the fact that she could not see blood creeping around to the right side from the left. Two more police cars passed them, screaming. “They gonna pull that one patrol car they have in Southeast and the only one they got in Northeast and bring em over here to join the dozens they keep in Georgetown. You watch, Derek,” he said to the mirror. “You just watch.”

“Derek,” she said. “Stop and let me help you.”

They had crossed Calvert, they had crossed Woodley, and he looked at her for the first time since they entered the car. “I lied,” he said. “I lied. Red wasn’t a bad color. It was way good anough for you. Any color you put on is a good color, didn’t you know that? You make the world. It ain’t never been the other way around. You first, then the world follows.” They were nearing Porter. Two blocks from the University of the District of Columbia he stopped, not far from her condominium building, which had one of the few doormen in Washington. “You can walk the rest of the way home,” he said. “All the bad thas gonna happen to you done already happened.”

She moved his jacket aside and saw where the blood had darkened his blue shirt, and when she touched him, the blood covered her hand and began to drip. “Come with me and let me help you.” And as she said this, her mind ticked off the actual number of years when she had last seen him. Three days later she would have the time down to weeks. She took a handkerchief and Kleenex from her pocketbook and pressed them gently to his side. “It’s bad, but manageable, I think. We need to get you help, though.”

He took her hand and placed it in her lap. “Let me be,” he said. “You best get home. You best go home to the man you married to.”

“Come in. You helped me, so let me help you.”

“You should tell that glorious husband of yours that a wife should be protected, that he shouldn’t be sleepin while you have to come home through the jungle of some white neighborhood. Tell him thas not what bein married should be about.”

She took the bloody handkerchief and Kleenex and returned them to her pocketbook. She did not now want to go home. She wanted to stay and go wherever he was going to recover. She snapped the pocketbook shut. Her father had walked her down the aisle, beaming all the way at the coming together of his two favorite families. The church had been packed and Terence had stood at the end of the aisle, waiting, standing as straight as he could after a night of drinking and pals and two strippers who had taken turns licking his dick for half of that night.

“You best go home.” “Please,” she said. “Let me stay.” He reached across her and opened the door. “And one last thing,” he said. “Neil been at me for the longest time to have me tell you it was never him. He was always afraid that you went about thinkin he was stuck on you, and he always wanted me to set the record straight. Now the record is straight.” How long can the heart carry it around? How long? The answer came to her in a whisper.

She got out and shut the door, and he continued on up Connecticut Avenue, his back red lights, throbbing and brightly vital, soon merging with all the rest of the lights of the Washington night. Her BMW was in the shop. The man had promised that it would be ready by the end of the week. Terence’s Mercedes had never seen a bad day.

As soon as she locked the door to the condominium, she heard the hum of the new refrigerator, and then the icemaker clicked on, and ice tumbled into the bucket, as if to welcome her home. The fan over the stove was going and she turned it off, along with the light over the stove, the two switches side by side. In the living room she noticed the blood on her uniform; if the doorman had seen it, he did not say. In the half darkness, the spots seemed fresh, almost alive in some eerie way, as if they had just that second come from Derek’s wound. Bleeding. Bleedin. She had emerged unscathed. The overhead fan of grand, golden wood in the living room was going, slowly, and she considered for the longest whether to switch it off. In the end she chose to stop the spinning. Her family had moved away from 8th Street when she was in college. And so had the Forsythes and the Spoonhours and the Prevosts and all the people she had known as she grew into womanhood. We are the future, her father-in-law Lane Stagg had proclaimed at a final dinner party at the Sheraton Hotel for the good neighbors. Who was left there now? Bad neighbors, her father had called those who came after them. Bad neighbors. Before the whites came back and planted their flags in the new world. The motor on the fish tank hummed right along; the light over the tank was on and she turned that off. The expensive tropical fish swam on even without the light. The stereo, which had cost the equivalent of seven of her paychecks, was not playing but the power light was on and she pushed the button to put the whole console to rest. She placed one finger against the fish tank, and all the fish in their colorful finery ignored it. Her father had risen at that hotel dinner and given the first toast, his hand trembling and his voice breaking at every fifth word. And he was followed by Lane Stagg, who was as eloquent as ever.

Terence was sleeping peacefully, one foot sticking out of the covers, the exquisite German clock’s dull red numbers shining down on him from the bedside table with the reassurance of a child’s night-light. Her father hated such clocks, the digital ones that told the time right out; he believed, as he had tried to teach Sharon and her brother, that children should learn to tell time the way he had learned, with the big hand and the little hand moving around a circle of numbers. Possibly a second hand, but that was not needed to know what time of day it was. She stood in the doorway and watched Terence and the clock, and for all the time she was there he did not stir. A burglar could come in, she thought, and he would never know it. She could stab him to death and end his world and he would never know it. She could smother him. The whole world could end and he would not know that either. The insurance they paid on all that they owned—not including the cars and their own lives, which had separate policies—came to $273.57 a month. It is worth it, the white insurance man had said as he dotted the final i, “because you will sleep better at night knowing you are protected.” Knowing. Knowin.

She got out of her clothes in the bathroom, took off everything she had on, even her underwear, and found that the blood had seeped through all the way to her skin. She held her uniform up before her. She stared at her name tag and found it hard to connect herself with the name and the uniform and the naked person they belonged to. Am I really who they say I am? The blood reminded her of someone that had a name but the name escaped her. Bleeding. Bleedin. None of Derek’s people had ever used the g on their ing words; one of the first things she herself had been taught early in life was never to lose the g. The g is there for a reason, they had told her. It separates you from all the rest of them, those who do not know any better. Sharon did not shower. Another Sharon in another time might have been unsettled by him appearing from nowhere, by the thought that he had been following her. But the idea that he had been there, out there in weather of whatever sort, out there in the dark offering no sign and no sound, out there for months and perhaps years of her life, seemed to give her something to measure her life by. But she did not know how to do that. After she turned out the bathroom light, she stood in the dark for a long time. In their bedroom she decided against putting on underwear and so got into bed the way she came into the world. Terence stirred, pulled his foot back under the covers, but beyond that, he did nothing. Almost imperceptibly, the rightmost red number on the fine German clock went from two to three.