That bitter derisive smile was on her lips again.
‘I don’t see how you can call a man like that quality, even as a joke,’ Darcy said, ‘or call him the natural father of your unborn child, whatever the circumstances might have been. To me he sounds like a beast.’
‘No!’ Martha said sharply. ‘He wasn’t a beast. He was a man. In some ways — in most ways —
he was a bad man, but a man is what he was. And he did have that something you could call
‘quality’ without a smirk on your face, although it only came out completely in the things he wrote.’
‘Huh!’ Darcy looked disdainfully at Martha from below drawn-together brows. ‘You read one of his books, did you?’
‘Honey, I read them all. He’d only written three by the time I went to Mama Delorme’s with that white powder in late 1959, but I’d read two of them. In time I got all the way caught up, because he wrote even slower than I read.’ She grinned. ‘And that’s pretty slow!’
Darcy looked doubtfully toward Martha’s bookcase. There were books there by Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown, Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed, but the three shelves were pretty much dominated by paperback romances and Agatha Christie mystery stories.
‘Stories about war don’t hardly seem like your pick an glory, Martha, if you know what I mean.’
‘Of course I know,’ Martha said. She got up and brought them each a fresh beer. ‘I’ll tell you a funny thing, Dee: if he’d been a nice man, I probably never would have read even one of them.
And I’ll tell you an even funnier one: if he’d been a nice man, I don’t think they would have been as good as they were.’
‘What are you talking about, woman?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. Just listen, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘Well, it didn’t take me until the Kennedy assassination to figure out what kind of man he was.
I knew that by the summer of ’58. By then I’d seen what a low opinion he had of the human race in general — not his friends, he would’ve died for them, but everyone else. Everyone was out looking for a buck to stroke, he used to say — stroking the buck, stroking the buck, everyone was stroking the buck. It seemed like him and his friends thought stroking the buck was a real bad thing, unless they were playing poker and had a whole mess of em spread out on the table.
Seemed to me like they stroked them then, all right. Seemed to me like then they stroked them plenty, him included.
‘There was a lot of big ugly under his Southern-gentleman top layer — he thought people who were trying to do good or improve the world were about the funniest things going, he hated the blacks and the Jews, and he thought we ought to H-bomb the Russians out of existence before they could do it to us. Why not? he’d say. They were part of what he called ‘the subhuman strain of the race’. To him that seemed to mean Jews, blacks, Italians, Indians, and anyone whose family didn’t summer on the Outer Banks.
‘I listened to him spout all that ignorance and high-toned filth, and naturally I started to wonder about why he was a famous writer . . . how he could be a famous writer. I wanted to know what it was the critics saw in him, but I was a lot more interested in what ordinary folks like me saw in him -the people who made his books best-sellers as soon as they came out.
Finally I decided to find out for myself. I went down to the Public Library and borrowed his first book, Blaze of Heaven.
‘I was expecting it’d turn out to be something like in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, but it didn’t. The book was about these five men and what happened to them in the war, and what happened to their wives and girlfriends back home at the same time. When I saw on the jacket it was about the war, I kind of rolled my eyes, thinking it would be like all those boring stories they told each other.’
‘It wasn’t?’
‘I read the first ten or twenty pages and thought, This ain’t so good. It ain’t as bad as I thought it’d be, but nothing’s happening. Then I read another forty pages and I kind of . . . well, I kind of lost myself. Next time I looked up it was almost midnight and I was two hundred pages into that book. I thought to myself, You got to go to bed, Martha. You got to go right now, because five-thirty comes early. But I read another thirty pages in spite of how heavy my eyes were getting, and it was quarter to one before I finally got up to brush my teeth.’
Martha stopped, looking off toward the darkened window and all the smiles of night outside it, her eyes hazed with remembering, her lips pressed together in a light frown. She shook her head a little.
‘I didn’t know how a man who was so boring when you had to listen to him could write so you didn’t never want to close the book, nor ever see it end, either. How a nasty, cold-hearted man like him could still make up characters so real you wanted to cry over em when they died. When Noah got hit and killed by a taxi-cab near the end of Blaze of Heaven, just a month after his part of the war was over, I did cry. I didn’t know how a sour, cynical man like Jefferies could make a body care so much about things that weren’t real at all — about things he’d made up out of his own head. And there was something else in that book . . . a kind of sunshine. It was full of pain and bad things, but there was sweetness in it, too . . . and love . . . ‘
She startled Darcy by laughing out loud.
‘There was a fella worked at the hotel back then named Billy Beck, a nice young man who was majoring in English at Fordham when he wasn’t on the door. He and I used to talk sometimes — ‘
‘Was he a brother?’
‘God, no!’ Martha laughed again. ‘Wasn’t no black doormen at Le Palais until 1965. Black porters and bellboys and car-park valets, but no black doormen. Wasn’t considered right. Quality people like Mr Jefferies wouldn’t have liked it.
‘Anyway, I asked Billy how the man’s books could be so wonderful when he was such a booger in person. Billy asked me if I knew the one about the fat disc jockey with the thin voice, and I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he said he didn’t know the answer to my question, but he told me something a prof of his had said about Thomas Wolfe. This prof said that some writers — and Wolfe was one of them — were no shakes at all until they sat down to a desk and took up pens in their hands. He said that a pen to fellows like that was like a telephone booth is to Clark Kent. He said that Thomas Wolfe was like a . . . ‘ She hesitated, then smiled.’ . .
. that he was like a divine wind-chime. He said a wind-chime isn’t nothing on its own, but when the wind blows through it, it makes a lovely noise.
‘I think Peter Jefferies was like that. He was quality, he had been raised quality and he was, but the quality in him wasn’t nothing he could take credit for. It was like God banked it for him and he just spent it. I’ll tell you something you probably won’t believe: after I’d read a couple of his books, I started to feel sorry for him.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Yes. Because the books were beautiful and the man who made em was ugly as sin. He really was like my Johnny, but in a way Johnny was luckier, because he never dreamed of a better life, and Mr Jefferies did. His books were his dreams, where he let himself believe in the world he laughed at and sneered at when he was awake.’
She asked Darcy if she wanted another beer. Darcy said she would pass.
‘Well if you change your mind, just holler. And you might change it, because right about here is where the water gets murky.’
‘One other thing about the man,’ Martha said. ‘He wasn’t a sexy man. At least not the way you usually think about a man being sexy.’ ‘You mean he was a — ‘