“Oh, honey,” Arlee says, drawing out the last vowel like the opening note of a torch song. “I can’t remember a time the two of them ever got along. They’re just different, always have been. Sunny’s a moneyman, a buttoned-up banker type, likes to rub elbows with potentates. A.G., all he ever wanted was to bang a piano. It started when he wasn’t nothing but a pup, used to play in the Methodist church, funerals and weddings, and that was fine, respectable. But when he come home from Prairie View, barely one semester under his belt, saying he was through, he was going to play for a living, well, you could hear the fights all the way over to Market Street. Sam cut him off, kicked him out. It was cold, sure it was, but that’s how black folks used to do sometimes, if they thought you were walking off a cliff. They’d kick your ass before anybody else got a chance to–excuse my language, baby. There was a sense that people hadn’t worked this hard and struggled for a better way of life just so you could run off and do what you wanted to do. No, you owed something for what you got, something you had to give back. Me, I can’t understand what we struggled for if it wasn’t to let our kids cut loose a little, be free,” she says. She shakes the dirt from her handkerchief before returning it, folded, to her pocket.
“Sam was a taskmaster, that’s for sure. But you got to understand how hard he worked for his kids, how much all of this,” she says, gesturing at the suburban vista, the streets of Pleasantville, “was for them. Axel was in the academy at that time, Ola in graduate school at TSU, and Delia was just starting medical school. And A.G.’s out in the streets, playing in juke joints every night. It just goaded Sam something awful. And Vivian, the more she stood up for A.G., the madder it made him. There’s not a soul out here who’ll tell you this, but I will. Sam and Viv, they almost broke up over A.G., twice,” she says.
“Who is Neal’s mother?”
“Oh, some little sorry gal he met along the way, on the road. Nine months later, she found him playing a gig halfway up to Austin and dropped that baby at the foot of the stage, least that’s the way the story made it back here.”
Jay, surprised at the news, especially considering how close Neal and his grandfather are, asks Arlee, “And Sam just accepted him? Just like that?”
“Of course he did. Just like he had accepted A.G.”
“Excuse me?”
Arlee gives him a knowing look, politely waiting for him to catch up.
Finally she says, “Sam didn’t invent stepping out.”
“Not his, huh?”
“The general consensus, especially after dark, what folks have whispered about for years, is no. Allan is not a Hathorne. And Sam knew from day one.”
“Hmmph,” Jay mutters.
He closes his eyes, taking this in, attempting, with this new information in hand, like a freshly unfolded map to a new territory, to trace the demise of their relationship in reverse, back to its original wound, whether Sam’s or A.G.’s.
“But they patched it up, for a little while, didn’t they?”
“He got off the drugs, came home for a while, that’s right. And god bless him, I think he really tried to come home. He threw himself into coaching, getting involved with the kids. This was around the time we were fighting ProFerma’s plans to set up the chemical plant. And he got involved in that too.”
Here, she sighs, reaching up to pat a few flyaway curls, wiry gray strands at her temples. The air has lifted a bit, picking up fallen leaves, rolling them across the sidewalk like marbles. Arlee shivers, crossing her arms across her chest. “But I don’t know. I guess it didn’t take,” she says. “But there were a lot of things around that time that didn’t turn out the way any of us wanted.”
CHAPTER 21
The first big surprise of the afternoon turns out not to be the lingering rumors about the paternity of Allan George Hathorne, not by a mile. It comes before Jay even breaches the boundaries of Pleasantville. Lonnie phoned to say she had no new information about the night Alicia disappeared, Elma Johnson and Magnus Carr being the only two neighbors who saw anything on the night in question. Plans were made to meet back at Jay’s car, which was parked a few doors down from Mr. Carr’s, on Ledwicke. After walking Ms. Delyvan back to her home on Tilgham, crossing, in the process, some ten blocks through the heart of the neighborhood, Jay doubles back, walking alone to the Land Cruiser to meet Lonnie. And that’s when he sees them. They’re in red T-shirts, every last one, even Tonya Hardaway, whose braids he recognizes at a distance of thirty yards. She’s wearing a Wolcott T-shirt, like the others, a team of block walkers she’s directing from an impromptu command center at the corner of Josie and Gellhorn. Jay halts in his tracks, pausing initially because it’s a sucker punch–the naked campaigning during an electoral injunction, which, though not expressly forbidden, seems for sure in bad taste, especially given the knowledge that it was Wolcott’s campaign that sent the dead girl into the streets of Pleasantville in the first place. It’s tacky, at best, and sinister, at worst, another bit of chicanery, the outcome of which Jay can’t divine from here. Would neighborhood residents really take to this kind of bald-faced proselytizing, in Axel Hathorne’s political backyard, no less? Curious, he watches the procession for a while, the zigzag pattern of volunteers on Josie Street, not going door-to-door, as he would have thought, but rather skip-hopping houses by some internal logic he can’t follow. Jay has never run a field campaign in his life, but what he’s witnessing here is different from any way he would ever have imagined going about it, what common sense would dictate: that you hit every door, every house, making contact with each and every voter, every potential step toward victory. Tonya can’t see him, not with her back to Ledwicke. And Jay is careful to hang back and observe what he can. Down Josie Street they go, knocking on doors, checking off street numbers and names on the small clipboards they’re carrying, returning periodically to their field director and sage, who distributes more slips of paper, directing the block walkers to specific houses and advising them to completely skip others. Jay recognizes, from his client list, some of the houses they’re canvassing.
2002 Josie Street is Mary Melendez’s place.
2037 is Robert Quinones and his wife, Darla.
2052 is Linda and Betty Dobson, sisters who’ve lived together for years.
2055 is Rutherford Tompkins, widower and retired firefighter who was home alone when the explosion happened last spring. One of the first on the scene, he established a safety zone, past which he wouldn’t allow any of his neighbors to cross, and joined firefighters from three counties battling the blaze.
“What in the hell?” Lonnie says when she catches up to Jay, following his gaze across Ledwicke. He doesn’t know if she’s cursing the fact that Wolcott’s team, on the eve of the trial, is still campaigning, or the bizarre manner in which the block walkers appear to be going about it. Either way his answer is, “I don’t know.”
“You want to talk to her?” she says, meaning Tonya.