The Ivory Grin Read Free Page A

rain. He dropped the hose and raced around after her.
    She reappeared on my side and snatched up the nozzle. When he came around the car she turned the white stream full in his face. He came on dripping and laughing, and wrenched the nozzle out of her hands. Their laughter joined.
    Face to face on the green grass, they held each other by the arms. Their laughter ended suddenly. The pepper tree shaded them in green silence. The water from the hose bubbled springlike in the grass.
    A door slammed. I heard its delayed percussion like the sound of a distant ax-blow. The lovers sprang apart. A stout black woman had come out on the porch of the white bungalow. She stood with her hands clasped at her thick aproned waist and looked at them without speaking. At least her lips didn’t move perceptibly.
    The boy picked up a chamois and began to polish the car top like somebody wiping out the sins of the world. The girl stooped for her shoes with an air of earnest concentration, as if she’d been searching high and low for them. She passed the boy without turning her head and disappeared around the side of the bungalow. The stout black woman went back into the house, closing the screen door soundlessly behind her.

CHAPTER 3 :     
I circled three quarters of the block
, left my car short of the intersection, and entered Mason Street from the other end, on foot. Under the pepper tree the Negro boy was still wiping down the Ford. He glanced at me as I crossed the road, but paid me no further attention.
    His house was the fifth on the north side of the street. I opened the white picket-gate of the third house, a stucco cottage wearing a television aerial like a big metal feather in its cap. I knocked on its screen door and took a black notebook and a pencil out of my inside breast pocket.
    The inner door was opened a few inches, the thin yellow face of a middle-aged Negro inserted in the aperture. “What do you want?” When they shut, his lips turned inward over his teeth.
    I opened the notebook and held the pencil poised over it. “My firm is making a national survey.”
    “There’s nothing we need.” The ingrown mouth closed, and the door closed after it.
    The door of the next house was standing open. I could see directly into a living-room crowded with old Grand Rapids furniture. When I knocked on the door, it rattled against the wall.
    The boy under the pepper tree looked up from the fender he was polishing. “Just walk right in. She’ll be glad to see you. Aunty’s glad to see anybody.” He added: “Mister,” as a deliberate afterthought and turned his wedge-shaped back on me.
    The voice of the house spoke up from somewhere in the rear. It was old and faded but it had a carrying quality, like a chant: “Is that you, Holly? No, it wouldn’t be Holly yet. Anyway, come in, whoever you are. You must be one of my friends, and they visit me in my room now, now that I can’t get out. So come on in.”
    The voice went on without a break, the words linked to each other by a pleasant deep-South slurring. I followed it like a thread across the living-room, down a short hallway, through the kitchen to a room that opened from it. “I used to have my visitors in the sitting-room, that wasn’t so long ago. Just lately the doctor told me, you stay in bed now, honey, don’t try to cook any more, let Holly do for you. So here I lie.”
    The room was small and bare, lit and ventilated by a single window, which was open. The source of the voice was a bed beside the window. Propped with pillows against the maple headboard, a Negro woman smiled from a sunken gray face, with great eyes like dark lanterns. Between the smiling blue lips the thread of talk unwound:
    “It’s a blessing for me, he said, that my joints are frozen solid with the arthritis, because if I tried to run around like I used to, my heart would give out sure. I told him he was a Job’s comforter, what good is keeping my heart going like a watch that won’t tell