Little Scarlet

42

I was reading Banjo when she came to the door. The knock was so soft that I couldn’t place it at first. It might have been a cat playing with a ball of yarn in the hallway.

But it was Jocelyn Ostenberg. She was still wearing that gray dress and she’d added a brunette wig. There was enough powder on her face to bake bread and her lips looked like they were painted with red nail polish. Rather than trying to be a white woman, she seemed like she was attempting to pass as a member of a lost race of clowns.

“Come in,” I said to the garish woman. “Come have a seat.”

I returned to my chair after the older woman was seated. She was carrying a big tan bag. I wondered if she had a gun in that purse. It bothered me that the idea wasn’t very far-fetched at all.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Your son owes me six hundred dollars,” I said. “He stopped me on the street, asking for a handout. I hired him to work on a wall I was building and he ran away with my power tools.”

The pinched expression returned to the tiny woman’s face.

“You brought the police to my house for a bunch of tools?”

“Good tools,” I said. “Power tools. And anyway, it’s the principle, not the money.”

“How did you find me?”

“On the day he was workin’ he talked about his life some. He talked about his mother, Jocelyn, so when he stole my property I looked you up in the book.”

It was a weak lie, very weak. But it was all I could manage.

“What do you do here?” she asked me.

“I do research,” I said. It was close enough to the truth that I would have probably passed a lie detector test.

“So then why were you building a wall?”

“Tell me where your son is or I will tell your husband that he’s married to a Negro woman who has a Negro son running around Watts committing crimes.”

“That’s extortion,” she said. “I could take you to court over that.”

“Where’s Harold?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years.”

“He said that he comes to your house now and then.”

“Not for years,” she said. There were tears somewhere near.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“You’re not doing this over some old tools.”

“I have your number right here, Miss Ostenberg. And I will call your house before you can get there.”

“It’s not right for you to do this.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, lady. Either you give up Harold or you give up your white life.”

“Do I look like a black woman to you?” she pleaded.

“You look like Bozo’s grandmother,” I said. “But I don’t care. I would go out in the streets and stage a one-man riot to get to Harold. So either you tell me what I want to know or I’ll tell everybody else about you.”

I could hardly believe how brutal I was toward that fragile, elderly woman. But I knew that Harold had given rise to all kinds of sorrow and the woman before me had given birth to him. She was responsible and I wouldn’t let up.

“Why do you want him so bad?” Jocelyn asked.

“Where is he?” I replied.

“I don’t know. You’ve seen him. He lives in the streets and alleys. He doesn’t have a phone or an address. He’s a derelict. Only thirty-seven and he’s just a bum.”

“Tell me about him,” I said.

“I told you. He’s worthless.” Her lips curled into a feral snarl. “He’s nothing.”

“Is that why he’s killing black women who get together with white men?”

For me it was her eyes. They opened wide at the accusation I leveled, wide and brown and down-home. She had the colored curse in her veins. I was sure that she saw it in the mirror every morning before dousing herself with powders and lightening creams, before she put on her wig and gloves and hat.

It wasn’t the first time I had met someone like her. And I didn’t hate her for hating herself. If everybody in the world despises and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself, your face and features, your parents, and even your child. It could all happen and you would never even know it. And then one hot summer’s night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why.

“What women?” Jocelyn said.

You. The word came into my mind but I didn’t say it. Maybe it wasn’t even true but I believed it. I believed that Harold Ostenberg had roamed around the streets looking for a place to put his rage. He found women who had betrayed him as his mother had. He killed them and stole their memories.

“The woman across the street said that you made Harold walk to school alone even when he was little,” I said.

“Lots of children go to school alone. I was busy keeping the house in order,” she said.

“She also told me that Harold ran away when he was just twelve.”

“He was a bad seed even then. You know, Mr. Rawlins, that some children are just born bad.”

“Who was his father?” I asked.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said. “His father left when Harold was just a baby.”

“Was he passing like you?”

“I don’t have to put up with this.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “Either that or you want me to go to your new white husband with this story.”

For a moment I believed that Jocelyn was going to walk out on me. She certainly wanted to. She certainly hated me.

“Carl came from St. Louis,” she said, defeated. “We met when we were both working for Third Avenue Bank. He was a loan officer and I was a teller. They thought we were white and we didn’t set them straight. But we could tell about each other. It wasn’t so wrong. We just wanted to get ahead. We wanted to work together. We bought a house.”

“Just a nice white couple from back East.”

“You have no right to judge me.”

“But black-skinned Harold did,” I said. “Somehow you and your light-skinned hubby made a mess in the nursery. Harold would be like a shit stain on your sheets.”

“You don’t have to be crude,” she said.

“I have never once murdered a black woman, Miss Ostenberg. I never once drove a child from my door.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Carl left me. He just went to work one day and never came back. I had no friends or family. All I had was Harold and he just couldn’t act right.”

“You mean he didn’t know why he had to pretend to be your maid’s child? He didn’t know why Honey May was pretending to be his mother?”

“You know her name?” Jocelyn asked.

“I’m looking for Harold,” I said. “I intend to find him with or without your help.”

“I don’t know where he is, Mr. Rawlins. He left me when he was twelve. I haven’t seen him since.”

“You sure you don’t wanna change that story? Once it gets out you won’t have a hole to hide in.”

She stood up on nearly steady feet and turned her back on me. She walked to the door and out without another word. I’d never felt such hatred in my life but I wasn’t quite sure right then of who or what I hated. I wasn’t even certain why.