The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  Ptolemy was flying above the park then. It was really more like a small forest than a manicured lawn. It gave him a giddy feeling seeing all the various people and hidden animals, paths and clumps of trees.

  He was flying above Los Angeles, and every once in a while he’d turn his gaze upward, where the blue was so intense that it made him feel as if he’d burn out his soul with the vision and so he had to look away, back to earth, where life was pedestrian and shabby.

  He was flying in his sleep, rising higher and higher until he remembered that men were not made to fly and that sooner or later he would come crashing back down to the ground. The sudden fright woke him and he sat up in the bed in his window-less room in the big blue house across the street from the public library.

  Ptolemy considered the dream of flying and fear of the fall. He thought about the picnic he had been to the weekend before with his friends who knew Ezra, who had a wife named Sensia.

  It was 6:45 in the morning.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future,” Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. “When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you’ll never know what might have been.”

  “How do I know when it’s time to move quick?” L’il Pea asked.

  “When somethin’ big happens and then somethin’ else come up.”

  Ptolemy got out of the bed, laughing at the foolishness of his childhood. He’d loved his uncle and cried for days after the old man’s demise but he had come to understand that Coy McCann was a dreamer mostly and that his lessons were either useless or dangerous.

  He opened the door, expecting a rooming-house neighbor who needed help of some sort. Everybody in the Blue Bonnet, as they called their home, was up early to go to work at some job cleaning or carrying, cooking or breaking stone.

  When he opened the door and saw Sensia Howard standing there, all Ptolemy could think about was Coy and how well he understood even the incomprehensible. Coy became Ptolemy’s religion on that morning, standing in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

  Ptolemy gawped at the girl, who now wore a green frock that made her brown skin glow like fire.

  “Are you gonna put on some pants, Mr. Grey?” were her first words to him.

  He was standing there in boxer shorts, expecting some normal person who shouldn’t expect him to get dressed after being dragged from bed.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Hold on.” And he went back to his closet and pulled out a pair of brown trousers and a yellow shirt.

  As he dressed he remembered that he hadn’t asked her in. Maybe she’d think this was an insult and leave. And so he went back to the door without putting on socks and shoes.

  Sensia was there, waiting.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  He only had one chair, and that had a book, a glass of water, and three stones he’d found that day at the park on it. They were blond stones, a color he’d never seen in rock and so he picked them up and brought them home, to be with them for a while. He wondered what Coy would have said about those pebbles as he removed them, the book, and the water glass from the chair.

  “Where do you want me to sit?” Sensia asked.

  “What are you doin’ here, Mrs. Howard?”

  “Howard’s my maiden name and I’m not married no more. At least not as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You not?”

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  “Thursday.”

  “And what day did we meet?”

  “Sunday. No, no . . . Saturday.”

  She smiled, studied the seating arrangements, and sat on the straight-back pine chair.

  “You go sit on the bed, Mr. Grey.”

  He did so.

  She beamed at him and nodded. “It was Saturday, because I left Ezra on Sunday, the day after he manhandled me.”

  Ptolemy felt like a bug fixed in amber, caught forever in brilliance and beauty beyond his understanding.

  “Mr. Grey?”

  “Yes, Miss Howard?”

  “Can I come sit next to you on your bed?”

  He gulped, which gave the impression of a nod, and so she moved from chair to bed, putting her hand on his knee.

  “My mama always told me,” she said, “that a woman must have at least three days between men. Three whole days or people could say that she was loose.”

  Ptolemy said, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” and they kissed lightly.

  “Why you shakin’ your head, Mr. Grey?”

  “Because I’m almost forty-six, will be in two months and a half, and I have never seen you comin’.”

  “I’m twenty-six,” Sensia said, and then kissed his cheek, “and I been waitin’ to find you every day I been alive.”

  “Me?”

  “I saw you at that barbecue party and I knew that you would read to me and hold me if I had fever. I knew that you would ask me how I was today and hear every word I said. A year later when I had forgot, you’d still be there to remind me. My man.”

  “And that’s why you left Ezra?”

  “No. I left Ezra because he pushed on me and grabbed at me. But he did that because he knew how much I wanted to be with you.”

  With that, Sensia stood up and took off her green dress and Ptolemy knew that Coy was right.

  “Are you gonna take off them pants?” she asked him, and the dream shifted while someone in the room moaned, either in ecstasy or pain.

  He woke up to find her dead twenty-two years later. She hadn’t put on a pound, smoked, or drunk to excess, but she died of a stroke in her sleep while he dreamed of waking up to her smile. She wasn’t yet forty-nine, would never be. She’d had lovers and times away, but Ptolemy couldn’t bring himself to leave her (except once), nor could he bar her from their door. In the decade before she died she had begun to hoard things: suitcases and clothes, newspapers and books. She’d go to secondhand stores and buy hat racks and jewelry boxes, furniture and musical instruments that she meant to learn to play but never did. The kitchen had fallen into disrepair and they ate take-out food from pizza kitchens and Chinese restaurants that were no more than holes in the wall. Ptolemy would get up every morning and buy them coffee in Styrofoam cups at the diner two blocks down.

  And he loved her.

  “What do you think about this dress,” she’d ask him, twirling about in something new or used that she’d bought with money he made working for the county maintenance department.

  He’d look at her posing, knowing that no man could get between this. She might meet someone now and then that distracted her; like Harlan Norman, who asked her to go to Hawaii with him. They spent a month, and all of Harlan’s money, on the islands, but then she came back, alone, with a big black pearl for Ptolemy.

  There were many days that Ptolemy wanted to kill Sensia. He’d bought a short-barreled .25-caliber pistol once when she didn’t come home for the weekend. But then, on Tuesday, she walked through their apartment door and smiled for him. He forgot his mission and they made love and she said she was sorry.

  One day she told him, “I will nevah cheat on you again, Papa,” and as far as he knew she hadn’t.

  When he woke up that morning next to her corpse he cried for an hour; cried calling emergency; cried while the ambulance drivers tried to resuscitate her.

  “Stroke,” the Asian paramedic said.

  “She nevah did you right, Pitypapa,” Niecie said.

  “Eleven hundred dollars,” the funeral director said.

  “Amen,” the preacher said to a room filled with men and women that had been her lovers over the years. Even Ezra Bindle was there. He had a portly wife and seven portly children but he came to say good-bye because Sensia was the kind of woman that lovers pined after even when they no longer felt the love.

  Ptolemy was already an old man. He read to Sensia at night and asked her about her day. He made her chicken so
up when she was ill—and she was often ill. She was never out of his mind since the first day he’d seen her and she shook off the grip of Ezra Bindle to be his woman.

  “Even if I wander, I will always find my way back home to you,” she’d told him.

  He’d put those words on her tombstone, sold two of Coy’s doubloons to pay for it and for the flowers to be put on her grave every Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday.

  “Wake up, Uncle,” Robyn said from somewhere beyond the blue, blue sky above the graveyard.

  Things began to happen quickly after the death and burial of Sensia Howard: Ptolemy saw himself as a young man with a stout lever under the light of an oil-soaked brand, moving the dark stone that hid the double-thick canvas bags filled with old gold coins; he was working, working, working cleaning out buildings set for demolition, or empty lots where the city planned to build, or the sidewalks in front of courts, office buildings, and police stations; he was talking to Coy in life and death, loving Sensia, missing his children (Rayford and Rayetta), who despised him after their mother had taken them away; and wondering what a treasure could do to save black folks who had been crushed down by a whole epoch of restrictions and pain.

  Uncle Grey?” Robyn said for maybe the thousandth time.

  “Yeah, babe?” he replied with his eyes still closed.

  “Are you awake?”

  He raised his lids then, like the curtain from a stage at the beginning of a play that he had wanted to see for many, many years. Robyn was sitting next to him, holding his hands in hers.

  “Right here,” he said. “How long?”

  “Four days,” Robyn said. “I called Dr. Ruben but his phone was disconnected. I wanted to tell somebody but I didn’t know who. Niecie been wantin’ to come ovah, but I told her that the doctor said that you had this bad flu, that anybody breathe yo’ air could get sick.”

  “Help me to sit up.”

  He looked around the old bedroom, the room where he awoke to find Sensia Howard dead. He no longer felt the pang of loss when thinking of Sensia, whom he had loved unconditionally. She was gone, off in a lovely dream.

  “Help me stand up.”

  “I thought you was gonna die, Uncle,” Robyn said as she half-supported him into the living room.

  He sat down on the rainbow hammock of his stool and stared at the TV. He reached out and pressed the I/O button and smiled as some comedy show came into view. His fingers felt hot, alive. He could sense the old bones beneath his leathered skin. He could feel the air and smell the sour odor rising from his body. He looked around.

  It had been decades since that room had been so clean and neat.

  “Robyn?”

  “Yeah, Uncle?”

  “You are a gift from God, you know that?”

  “Are you okay?” she replied.

  “Nevah bettah, nevah once in all my years.”

  “Yo’ skin is hot,” she said.

  “Burnin’ bright,” he said with depth to his raspy voice.

  “Maybe we should see a doctor.”

  “We already seen the doctor,” he said. “What we gotta do is make things right, make things right ...” He stalled for a moment, then found the thread of his thoughts again. “Because there’s a lot to do for you and Reggie’s kids, for Niecie and black folks all ovah the world.”

  “Like what?”

  Instead of answering, Ptolemy looked at his child savior. She didn’t have the magic of Sensia or the deep, crazy accuracy of Coydog, but Robyn was the best of them . . . Ptolemy dawdled over this thought a moment. Here he was, sitting on a folding chair in his home after years of sadness and careless loss. His mind had fallen in on itself like an old barn left unmended and untended through too many seasons.

  “What, Uncle?” Robyn asked.

  “A gift from God,” he said again. “Without you I wouldn’t even be here.”

  “Somebody else woulda come,” Robyn said, bowing her head.

  “Yeah. They’da come, but I still wouldn’t be here. It’s me that’s the lump’a clay and you that’s the hand of God.”

  Pitypapa!” Niecie exclaimed when Ptolemy and Robyn showed up at her door three days later.

  He’d needed twenty-four hours to recover from the weakness four days in bed had put on him. The next day he bathed and pondered, read a book called Real Time, and listened to jazz on the radio. Then he went to a small men’s store on Central and bought a dark-blue suit with a deep-brown shirt and a yellow tie and black shoes.

  “That the way you used to dress when you was a playah, Mr. Grey?” Robyn had asked him while he stood before the store’s triple dressing mirror.

  “No, baby. That’s Coydog McCann I see in the mirror—the classiest man I evah knew.”

  After donning his new clothes Ptolemy took Robyn to the ladies’ shop next door, and then to the taxi stand on Normandie. From there they went to Niecie’s home.

  “Hey, Niecie,” the old man said in a tone he hadn’t known for decades. “How you doin’, sugah?”

  Niecie stopped there in the desolate living room, cocking her head to try and get a bead on the voice she was hearing.

  “I’m all bettah now, Niecie,” Ptolemy said. “Robyn done took me to a doctor near about killed me, but then he pulled me back from the night.”

  “You can, you can think bettah now, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked, stumbling on her own tongue. “Like when you was young?”

  “Mmmm,” Ptolemy said, smiling and nodding. “But I’m still old in my bones, so you gonna offah me a seat?”

  After Robyn got the lemonade from the kitchen, big-bodied Hilliard came back from a run to the store with Letisha and Arthur in tow. The big thief frowned when he saw Ptolemy sitting there with his legs crossed and a glass of lemonade in his hand.

  “Boy,” Ptolemy greeted. He wasn’t mad at the young man anymore.

  “Name’s Hilly, not boy.”

  “Hilliard, you will speak respectfully to elders in my house,” his mother said.

  Hilliard glowered.

  “Why you wouldn’t let me in your house when I come all the way ovah there to see about you, Papa Grey?”

  “You know why.”

  “’Cause you old an’, an’, an’ senile.”

  “Hilliard!” Niecie said.

  “It’s true.”

  “Maybe I was a little forgetful,” Ptolemy admitted, “but I could still count up to three with the best of ’em.”

  “You see, Mama? He talks crazy.”

  The angry young man’s tone was aggressive. Robyn put her hand in her purse as Ptolemy smiled. The children huddled next to their auntie Niecie’s chair, staring at Hilly as if he were some dangerous stranger.

  “I ain’t so crazy I don’t know how to make you listen,” Ptolemy said.

  He put his hand inside his breast pocket and came out with a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

  The sight of money hit Hilly like a slap.

  “What’s that, Pitypapa?” Niecie asked.

  “Yo’ boy took me to the bank with three checks, got my signature, but only gave me money for the one,” Ptolemy said. “That’s why he blusterin’, ’cause he feel guilty. But I had Robyn bring me ovah here to bury the hatchet.”

  He leaned over, handing the roll of cash to his grandniece.

  “That’s six hunnert dollahs, Niecie. I wanna make sure that these kids is gettin’ what they need. I’ma give you sumpin’ like that ev’ry mont’. Lucky I didn’t give yo’ son my passbook or I might not have nuthin’ left ta give ya.”

  “My boy does not steal,” Niecie said, clutching the wad in her lap. “You gettin’ old, Pitypapa. You just made a mistake thinkin’ you give him three checks but it was only one.”

  Ptolemy noticed then that she was wearing a maroon dress with pink flowers stitched into it. It was faded and worn.

  “Madeline Richards made that dress for you, didn’t she?” Ptolemy asked.

  Robyn grinned when she saw the surprise on her one-time guardian’s fac
e.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Sensie introduced you to Maddie. An’ Maddie made clothes for a livin’. She always was partial to flower patterns, an’ when she couldn’t find no cloth with a flower she sewed some on.”

  “I remember meetin’ Maddie,” Niecie said. “She made this dress maybe fifteen years ago.”

  “When you was a li’l girl your uncle Roger called you Betty Boop because you loved to watch that cartoon on the TV. If you’d sing her boop-boop-pe-doop song he’d give you two nickels.”

  Hilda “Niecie” Brown frowned and cocked her head again. Her eyes narrowed to slits, and after a moment or two she nodded.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right. Uncle Roger. He died in Vietnam and I cried for what felt like a whole week. He wasn’t really my uncle, though.”

  “That’s what yo’ mama said, but he was her brother usin’ another name because he had killed a man in Alabama and then took on another man’s identity. He died under a false name. He really was your uncle, but nobody said it so that he didn’t get put on a Alabama chain gang.”

  “You remembah all that, Pitypapa?”

  “Doctor cured me, baby,” Ptolemy said as he rose to his feet.

  Robyn stood behind him, her hand still in her purse, her eye on Hilliard.

  “He opened my mind all the way back to the first day I could remembah as a child. I can think so clear that I could almost remembah what my father’s father was thinkin’ the day he conceived my old man. So you could say what you will but that boy there’s a thief an’ if you don’t tell him sumpin’ he gonna go the way that Roger would’a gone if anybody evah breathed his real name.”

  Robyn kept her eyes on Hilly while Niecie stared at her uncle, looking for the man she’d seen little more than a month before.

  When she didn’t speak, Ptolemy addressed her again: “I’ma give you that six hunnert dollahs for these kids here ev’ry month. As long as they with you I’ma give it to ’em, but I won’t if you send ’em back to they mama.”