The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read online

  The old man glanced across the street and saw a big sand-brown woman sitting on a stoop. She was smoking a cigarette and between her fat knees were huddled two toddlers in diapers and nothing else.

  “Her.”

  Two blocks away they came to a small house that was once painted bright blue and yellow, Ptolemy remembered, but now the colors were dim and dingy. There were cars parked in the driveway and at the curb at the house across the street. Men and women in their Sunday best were standing on the brown grass and up beyond the cars.

  “What’s today?” Ptolemy asked Hilly.

  “The fifteenth,” the young man replied.

  Four rose bushes had died under the front window. A fifth rose was still alive. It had nine or eleven bright green thorny leaves and a bud that might one day blossom. Ptolemy noticed a spigot behind the struggling plant and realized that it was a leak that made it possible for that rose to survive.

  Hilly held Ptolemy’s elbow as they went up the wooden stairs that had worn down into grooves from the heavy foot traffic over the years. As they approached the screen door, Ptolemy could see that there was a party going on. Dozens of people were crowded into the living room, talking and smoking, drinking and posing in their nice clothes.

  Hilly reached for the screen door but it flew inward before he touched it.

  “Pitypapa!” a woman yelled. “Pitypapa, I ain’t seen you in six and a half years.”

  Big, copper-brown, and buxom Hilda “Niecie” Brown folded the frail old man in a powerful yet cushioned embrace. For a brief span that extended into itself Ptolemy was lifted out of his pained elderly confusion. He floated off into the sensation of a woman holding him and humming with satisfaction.

  She kissed his forehead and then his lips. When she let him go he held on to her arm.

  “Oh, ain’t that sweet?” Niecie said. “You miss me, Pitypapa?”

  Ptolemy looked up at her face. Her skin was smooth and tight from fat. Her mouth was smiling, showing two golden teeth, but in spite of the brave front Niecie’s eyes were so sad that he felt her agony. He raised his hands through the pain of his shoulders and placed them on the sides of Niecie’s arms.

  “Niecie,” he said. “Niecie.”

  “Come on in, Pitypapa. Come on in and sit with me.”

  The crowded room smelled of food, cigarettes, and booze. Four children were playing on a green couch but Niecie shooed them away.

  “Sit with me, Papa,” she said. “Tell me how you been doin’.”

  Ptolemy sat looking around the room, remembering the house. He had come here for Niecie’s wedding and later, when her mother, June, had died. June was his oldest sister’s child, he remembered. She died of pneumonia, the doctor said, but anyone could have told you that she really died because she went wild with drink and dance after Charles had died.

  “You remember my house?” Niecie asked.

  “I only remembah it bein’ old,” he said. “I was already old when you got married. There ain’t nuthin’ here young or childish.”

  Even Niecie’s smile was sad now.

  A short girl came up to stand next to Niecie. She was dark-skinned; not as dark as Ptolemy but almost.

  “You remember Robyn?” Niecie asked. “But maybe not. Maybe she came here to live wit’ me since the last time I seen you. Her mother died an’ me an’ Hilly took her in.”

  Robyn was no more than eighteen and she was beautiful to Ptolemy. Her almond-shaped eyes looked right into his, not making him feel old or like he wasn’t there. And there was something else about her: she didn’t remind him of anyone he had ever met before. Usually, almost always, people looked to him like someone he’d already met along the way. That was why he found it so hard to remember who someone was. Faces usually made him want to remember something that was lost. He felt sometimes that he had met everyone, tasted every food, seen every sky there was to be seen.

  “I seen it all,” old Coydog used to say, “but that don’t mean I seen everything.”

  Ptolemy understood now because Robyn was someone, something, new to him.

  “Hi,” she said with perfect lips that smiled briefly, showing off her strong white teeth.

  “You grinnin’, Pitypapa,” Niecie said. “All the men here be grinnin’ after Robyn.”

  “I have never seen anything like you, girl,” Ptolemy said.

  Robyn put out a hand and he took it, staring at her.

  He was suddenly aware that somewhere a woman was crying. The faraway, muted sobs were pitiful. For some reason this made Ptolemy remember.

  “Where’s Reggie?” he asked Robyn.

  With her eyes she indicated someplace behind Ptolemy. He tried to turn his head but his old joints wouldn’t cooperate.

  “Why don’t you go with him, Robyn?” Niecie said.

  Ptolemy was still holding her hand. She pulled gently and he got up with a minimum of pain in his knees. Robyn was just about his height. He grabbed on to her elbow and she guided him through the mob of guests in the living room. They went into a narrow hallway that made the house seem larger because it was so long.

  They passed a room from which came the sad sobbing. He removed his grip from Robyn’s arm. Gently she took the hand in hers.

  “Why she’s cryin’?” Ptolemy asked.

  “She been like that for hours,” the girl answered.

  They came to a brown door that was closed. Robyn opened the door and stood aside for Ptolemy to pass through.

  It was a very small chamber, only big enough for the single bed and an open coffin. The pine box fit Reggie’s hefty proportions perfectly. The tall young brown man’s waxy hands were crossed over his chest. His face was calm but the smile that the mortician had placed there was not any expression that Reggie had in life.

  Ptolemy turned to Robyn with his mouth open—screaming silently. He forgot how to breathe or even how to stand. Falling forward into the child’s arms, the old man cried, “No.”

  “Didn’t Hilly tell you?” Robyn asked.

  Ptolemy heard the question but didn’t remember. Maybe the boy had said something. Maybe he wasn’t listening when he did. Maybe if he had listened Reggie wouldn’t be dead.

  Ptolemy pushed against Robyn’s shoulders and turned to see the boy. Big oily tears came down his face. He leaned over the low-standing coffin, putting his hands against Reggie’s chest, tears falling upon his own knuckles and Reggie’s. The young man’s chest felt like the hard mattress that Coydog slept on in his room at the back of Jack’s Barber Shop, where he lived after they kicked him out of his apartment for not paying the rent.

  Reggie had a long face with a small scar at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were closed. His black suit was new.

  “I don’t know why I gotta buy him a new suit t’get buried in,” Ptolemy’s father, Titus Grey, complained when his wife, Aurelia, had demanded they get good clothes to bury Titus’s father in. “He never even came by once when I was growin’ up. Not so much as one hello to his son and now you want me to spend a month’s wages on a new suit he only gonna wear once.”

  “It’s not for him,” Aurelia had said. “Look here.”

  She touched Titus with one hand and with the other she gestured at Li’l Pea. Ptolemy thought that he was maybe five at that time.

  “You see your son?” Aurelia asked.

  Titus looked but did not speak.

  “When you pass, how do you want him to remember you?” she asked her husband. “He watch you day and night. He practice talkin’ like you an’ walkin’ like you. So what you gonna show him to do when he have to lay you an’ me to rest?”

  That night he was lying in his bed with his eyes open, thinking about his grandfather lying on the undertaker’s table. From the darkness came candlelight and the heavy steps of his father. The huge sharecropper sat on the boy’s cot and placed his hand upon Ptolemy’s chest.

  “I love you, boy,” he’d said.

  There was a whole conversation after that but Ptolemy couldn’
t remember it. There was something about his grandfather’s death, about men who love their sons . . .

  Ptolemy didn’t remember sitting down on the bed across from Reggie’s coffin, but there he was. Robyn was seated next to him, holding his hands. Maybe he had told her the story of his grandfather’s death or maybe he was just thinking about it. They had been talking; he was pretty sure about that.

  He noticed that the yellow wallpaper had slanted red lines that were going opposite ways, almost meeting each other to form unconnected capital T’s. Seeing this, recognizing the pattern, made him smile.

  “When did your father die?” Robyn asked.

  “A long time ago,” he said. “I seen a lotta people die. Dead in bed, and lynched, but the worst of all is when some stranger come to the do’ an’ tell ya that your father is dead an’ ain’t nevah comin’ home again.”

  “You have big hands, Mr. Grey,” Robyn said. She was squeezing the tight muscle between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand. “Strong.”

  The pressure hurt and felt good at the same time.

  “He stoled my money,” he said.

  “Who did?”

  “I had three checks at the place but he only give me the money for one. I give ten dollars to this woman had a green ring and then thirty-two dollars and thirty-seven cent fo’ my groceries. But now all I got in my envelope is a hunnert an’ sixty-sumpin’ dollars and a few pennies. That adds up to two eleven, but I had three checks for that much. I know ’cause I save ’em up so Reggie only have to go to the bank with me once ev’ry three weeks. We put one check in a account for my bills to be paid and we spend one on groceries.”

  “Reggie stoled your money?” Robyn asked.

  “Yeah . . . I mean no. Reggie wouldn’t steal. It’s that big boy, that, that, that ...”

  “Hilly?”

  “There, you got it.”

  So much talking and thinking exhausted Ptolemy. Then remembering that Reggie was dead and that they’d never go to the bank again made him sad.

  Robyn squeezed his hand and tilted her head to the side so that he’d have to notice her.

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Grey,” she said. “It’s all gonna be all right.”

  “How?”

  “Reggie gonna go to heaven an’ Hilly gonna go to hell.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes I am,” Robyn said, her young features set with grim certainty.

  Such serious intentions on a child’s face made Ptolemy smile. His smile infected her and soon they were giggling together, holding hands, sitting next to Reggie’s corpse.

  After a while the girl stood up, pulling Ptolemy to his feet. Together they left the dead man and went back down the long hall. When they approached the room where the woman cried, Ptolemy asked, “Is that the girlfriend?”

  “They been married for three years.”

  “His wife?” Ptolemy remembered that Reggie was gone for four days once because of his wedding. Then he’d gotten a job at a supermarket and would bring him strawberry jam and old-fashioned crunchy peanut butter almost every week.

  Robyn nodded. “And their children. She sat down in Niecie’s room on the way back from seein’ Reggie an’ now she cain’t stop cryin’.”

  Ptolemy pushed the door open and walked in.

  The room was filled with yellow light. The walls and the floor were dark, dark blue. A high-yellow woman was slumped across the blue sheets of the bed, crying, crying. Lying next to her head was a toddler girl in fetal position and sucking her thumb. Next to the girl sat a five-year-old boy who was turning the pages of a book. Both children were much darker than their mother.

  The boy looked up when Ptolemy and then Robyn came in.

  “You readin’ that book, boy?” Ptolemy asked slowly as if each word was a heavy weight on his tongue.

  The boy nodded.

  “What’s it say?”

  The child shrugged and looked back at the book.

  “His name is Arthur,” Robyn whispered.

  The boy looked up and said, “It got pictures of people with no skin an’ pictures of hands and feet and other parts.”

  “Aunt Niecie was goin’ to nurse school for a while,” Robyn said. “It’s prob’ly one’a her schoolbooks.”

  Arthur nodded solemnly and scratched his nose.

  “Nina,” Robyn said then. “Nina, this here is Mr. Grey, the one that Reggie helped out.”

  The woman raised her head from folded arms. Ptolemy could see that she was young, in her early twenties, no more. Her face was devastated and beautiful; far more lovely, Ptolemy thought, than Robyn. But he still liked Robyn better. He liked her way around him. She knew how to speak when he needed her.

  Nina rose up and put her arms around Ptolemy. Again he felt lost in a soft hug. It was like sinking into a warm tub at the end of a hard day.

  “He loved you so much, Mr. Grey,” Nina said. She smelled sweet from perfume. Too sweet.

  “What happened to him?” the old man asked, pulling away as he spoke.

  When Nina fell back on the bed the toddler whined and Arthur put his hand on her cheek. She embraced her brother’s fingers with her head and shoulder. This gentle show of affection seemed to make the room clearer to Ptolemy. It was as if he was seeing something the way that minister had, in front of his white church so long before.

  “They shot him down,” Nina said.

  “Who shot him?”

  “Drive-by.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Nobody knows,” Robyn said. “Somebody jes’ shot him when he was sittin’ on a porch of a friend’a his.”

  “But they say his name was Drivebee.”

  “No. The men drove by in their car and jes’ shot him.”

  The little girl was crying. Arthur lay down behind her and put his arms around her shoulders.

  “Why?” Ptolemy asked.

  “Nobody knows.”

  Ptolemy squinted, trying to see with his mind’s eye the reasoning behind Reggie’s murder. He remembered his hidden box and a promise he’d made Coydog before the old man was dragged off and killed like some wild animal. It was something that happened to colored men and boys ever since they left the land of Ptolemy, father of Cleopatra.

  There came the sound of heavy feet down the hall.

  “Nina?” a man’s voice called from outside the room.

  Ptolemy turned just in time to see a man come through the door. It was a freckle-faced, strawberry-brown man with straightened, combed-back hair. He was handsome but had a wild look to him as if there were something or someone right behind him, ready to strike. The man was tall and wore a purple shirt that was open down to the bottom of his chest. He wore a thick gold chain that held a pendant which formed the name Georgie, written in slanted letters.

  Reggie’s wife rose from the bed like a creature coming up out of the water. Her movements were fluid, graceful. The idea of dancing came into Ptolemy’s wandering mind.

  “Alfred,” she said.

  They grabbed each other, kissed on the lips, and then pressed their cheeks and bodies together.

  “Who’s that, Mama?” Arthur asked.

  “Who’s this?” Alfred asked, looking at Ptolemy.

  “This is ...” Nina began saying but she had forgotten the name.

  “Mr. Ptolemy Grey,” Robyn said, snipping her words to their shortest possible length. “Reggie’s great-uncle.”

  “Who’s that, Mama?” Arthur asked again.

  “Oh,” Alfred said. “Hey, Mr. Grey. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “If your name is Alfred, how come you got a sign sayin’ Georgie hangin’ from your neck?”

  A flash of anger crossed the haunted man’s face.

  “He don’t mean nuthin’, Alfred,” Robyn said. “It’s just a question.”

  “Georgie was my brother,” Alfred said angrily. “They shot him down.”

  “They shoot your brother too?”

  “What?” Alfred said, jutting his head
toward Ptolemy.

  Robyn moved between the men.

  “He’s a old man, Alfred,” she said. “He sit all day in his house listenin’ to German music and readin’ old papers.”

  “He bettah get some news, then,” Alfred said threateningly.

  Nina went to Alfred’s side and took his arm.

  “We bettah get outta here, Alfie,” the grieving widow and mother said.

  But Alfred was not finished staring at the old man.

  Ptolemy thought it was funny that a fool like that would try and intimidate him. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid hardly at all.

  “Yeah,” Alfred said. “I come to take you and the kids back to your house.”

  “Okay,” Nina said. “Come on, babies.”

  Arthur and his sister started crying. They didn’t say that they didn’t want to go or even shake their heads. They just cried.

  For their daddy, Ptolemy thought.

  “Why’ont you let the kids stay here with Big Mama Niecie?” Robyn suggested. “She feed ’em an’ stuff.”

  “Do you wanna stay here, Artie? Letisha?”

  Arthur nodded and Letisha put her head in her brother’s lap.

  “You sure?” Nina asked. “Okay. Mama’s gonna go home and sleep now. She’s tired.”

  The baby girl whimpered for her mother but would not leave her brother’s lap. Nina kissed them both on their foreheads and then moved as if she wanted to kiss Robyn. But the younger girl leaned away. Nina played it off, putting her hand on Robyn’s shoulder.

  All the while Alfred glared at Ptolemy.

  The old man stared back, trying to understand what was happening, what had happened.

  Nina turned away from her children and left under the protective arm of the handsome Alfred. Nina glanced back at her children as she went through and past the doorframe. Ptolemy listened to their shoes on the hardwood floor of the hallway.

  “Where they goin’?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” Robyn said. “You hungry, Arthur?”

  “Tisha is.”

  “What she want?” Robyn asked with a smile.

  “Cake.”

  “Did you have some dinner?”

  “No, but we want some cake.”

  “Okay,” Robyn said, “but jes’ this one time now.”