Chapter 4: Say Your Name

Volume One: The Ones in the Play

He came back up Winter Street with the clinic form folded to the size of a card and his thumb on the crease.

The green was still in the street. It pooled in the low places where the rain had gathered and not run off, and it hung along the undersides of the awnings, thin as the color at the bottom of a bottle. Two women on the corner had set their market bags down on the pavement and stood over the water in the gutter, waiting for it to do something.

“Third time,” one said.

“Fourth,” the other said. “The aurora got into the church basement Sunday. My sister’s knees have been green since.”

Elliot kept his eyes level with the doorways and walked on. A boy went past him hauling a handcart with a wet mattress roped down on it, and the wheels made a sound like a saw going through something soft.

Number 128 had the front windows open. Somebody had swept the walk — the broom was still out, leaning against the stoop with its bristles in the wet — and the hall boards inside were dark where they had been washed and not yet dried.

He stopped on the top step. The door was shut and the chain was on, and through the glass he could see that the front room had changed shape: the sewing machine pulled out from the wall to the window, the treadle on a square of old rug, a chair turned to face the light.

He knocked twice with the flat of his hand.

The treadle stopped. A moment later the door came back the width of the chain, and Milo looked out at him through the gap with his chin down.

“You’re back.”

“Nine o’clock,” Elliot said. “You said six.”

“I said they come back at six.” Milo shut the door, worked the chain off, and opened it again. “There was nobody in the house all morning but me.”

Milo stepped aside. He was fifteen and built like somebody who had been thin for years and had stopped noticing. He had a needle pushed through the cuff of his sleeve and a pair of shears in his back pocket, and he went back to the machine and sat down and put his foot on the treadle before Elliot had the door shut.

The coat on the machine was gray wool, a man’s coat cut down for a boy, and the shoulder seam had gone on one side. Milo had opened it out flat and pinned it and started in the middle, and the line of stitching ran crooked for two inches and then straightened out.

Elliot hung up his jacket and stood behind him and watched the needle go.

“You’re pulling it,” he said.

Milo’s foot came off the treadle.

“The thread. You’re pulling it through with your hand instead of letting the feed take it. That’s why it puckers.”

“I know why it puckers.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“I did it once.” Milo turned the coat over and showed him. “It’s the inside.”

Elliot looked at the inside. The pucker ran down the shoulder like a scar that had healed badly, and the rest of the seam was straight, and the rest of the seam was better than anything in the windows on Coldbrook Street.

A costume-shop seamstress had once made him stand at her machine and say out loud why a seam pulled before she would let him near a needle.

“It’s a good coat,” Elliot said.

“It’s Gerald’s coat.”

“It’s still a good coat.”

Milo put it back under the needle and didn’t answer, and the treadle started up again, and Elliot went into the kitchen.

The kitchen smelled of vinegar and had a window over the sink that gave onto the yard. The yard was all standing water, and the shed stood with its door open, and inside the shed the mower had its engine taken out and set on a shelf like a part waiting to go back in. Through the glass he could see the back step and the shoes on it, heels up, still dark with water. They had been there when he came in that morning, and he had left them there, because he did not know where in this house a pair of shoes was supposed to go.

He had slept in that shed a few hours the night before, with the rain coming through the roof at one corner, and he knew the mower had no engine. He had known it before he looked in. That was the part he was having trouble with — not the knowing, the not being surprised.

He took the clinic form out of his pocket and opened it on the table and looked at it. The mug’s ring had gone through four folds, brown at the edge, and W. Hollis still read through it. He folded it again and put it back in his pocket and filled the kettle from the tap. The water came brown for a second and then cleared, and he set the kettle on the stove and lit the gas.

“Not that tea,” Milo called from the other room.

“I’m making it out of water.”

“Then say that.”

Elliot got down two cups and set the sugar bowl between them, and then stood at the sink with his hands under the tap, running cold, and looked at them.

They weren’t shaking. Twenty minutes ago he had set them flat on the counter at the clinic and let a woman see them shake, and she had sent him through to the back.

Two papers, and his lie was on both of them. A Warden had written Wes Hollis into the daybook and said the file closed on the first; after that a man who turned up would be somebody else’s trouble. Elliot had not decided yet whether that was good news.

The mug was the other thing. He had drunk it — whatever else was in it, he had drunk it — and the shaking had gone out of his hands and stayed out, and nothing else had happened to him that he could point to. He had never known a thing to come free, and he did not know the price of this one, and there was nobody in this house he could ask.

“The water’s running,” Milo said from the doorway.

Elliot shut it off.

“How much was it,” Milo said.

“Four dollars.”

“You pay it?”

“No.”

“So it’s four dollars.”

“It’s four dollars.” Elliot turned the gas down under the kettle because it was beginning to roar. “He said come back Thursday if the cold’s still in me. There’s no cold in me.”

“Four dollars Thursday.” Milo sat down at the table and pulled the sugar bowl over with two fingers and didn’t touch it. “What did you write on the paper.”

“Which paper.”

“His paper. The one he gives you before he touches you. Name, address, what’s wrong with you.”

Elliot looked at the kettle. “Hollis. Wes Hollis.”

“All of it?”

“Name and address.”

“Which address.”

“One twenty-eight Winter Street. I gave him this one.”

Milo sat still for a second. Then he put both hands flat on the table and looked at them.

“That’s her address,” he said.

“It’s where I slept.”

“It’s where she sleeps.” Milo looked up. “There’s a drawer at that clinic with a paper in it that says a man named Hollis lives in her house. The woman at the desk writes what you say and the doctor writes what he finds and neither one of them asks a question, and then it goes in the drawer.”

Elliot said nothing.

“So don’t tell me you didn’t think,” Milo said. “Tell me what you’re going to do about the paper.”

“Nothing,” Elliot said. “There’s nothing to do about it. It’s in the drawer.”

The kettle began to whistle. He took it off the gas and poured, and set a cup in front of Milo and one at his own place.

Milo picked up his cup and held it without drinking, and then he said, “Was there anyone in the front room? A woman with a boy.”

“Yes.”

“Boy about six. Asleep on her.”

“Yes.”

“Her name’s Ruth Bailey.” Milo set the cup down. “She’s got the room over the laundry, four doors from that clinic. She’s been in this house every week since I was six years old. She saw you come up the walk last night with mud to the ankle and no shoes, and she asked me whose boy you were before I got the door shut.”

“And you said—“

“Ma’s cousin’s boy. From the coast.” Milo turned the cup around on the table. “She’ll be polite about it for about a week. And I told her the shoes on the step were mine.”

“Were they?”

“No.”

“Whose were they?”

Milo’s cup came down on the table a little harder than it needed to and the tea came over the lip.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“You know what.” He wiped the tea up with the side of his fist. “You’ve been at it since you came up the walk. It doesn’t get better if I say it out loud.” He sucked the tea off his knuckle. “So take the cup and sit down.”

Elliot sat down.

The tea was thin and hot and tasted of the pipes. Milo drank his down and made a face at it and poured himself another.

Elliot’s hands stayed steady around the cup. He watched them stay steady.

“Milo.”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“I know it starts with a question.” Milo turned his chair back to the machine. “I’m working. You can sit here.”

So Elliot sat there.

The afternoon came in through the window and moved along the floor, and the machine went and stopped and went, and Milo turned the coat on the table and did the collar, and Elliot watched him do it, and once Milo got up and went out and came back with the broom and swept the front walk again even though it was clean.

At some point Elliot got up and found the polish and did the brass on the door and the knocker. At some point he took the dishes down and washed them, and then washed them a second time, not having remembered the first. And then he stood a while in the hall with his hand on the frame of the photograph on the side table, because it had been face down when he came in that morning, and he turned it face up and left it that way and went back to the front room.

The green went out of the sky a little before five, and out of the puddles after that, and the water in the low places was only water.

At six the light was the ordinary gray of an early autumn evening, and the house smelled of the polish and of nothing else, and Elliot was sitting in the front room with the coat across his knees, checking the collar seam with his thumb, when the key went into the front door.

Gerald came in first.

He was a big man and he came in the way a big man comes into his own house, without slowing down, and he put his keys in the bowl and turned and looked at Elliot, and did not stop looking at him. He had his hat in his hand.

There was somebody behind him on the step.

“Inside,” Gerald said, and Lorraine came in.

She was smaller than her clothes. She had the canvas bag over one arm and she set it down inside the door and stood with her hands clasped and her coat still on, and she looked at Elliot the way you look at a puddle where you dropped something.

Milo came in from the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“He’s Ma’s cousin’s boy,” he said. “From the coast. Wes.”

Nobody said anything.

“Ma’s cousin’s boy,” Milo said again. “He’s been here since Tuesday. He’s helping out with the house while I’m at school.”

Gerald’s jaw worked once. Then he said, “Which cousin.”

“The one that writes.”

“There isn’t one that writes.”

“There is now,” Milo said.

Neither of them looked at the other. Neither of them looked away from Elliot. And in the end Gerald hung his hat on the hook and left it there, and Lorraine’s hands came apart.

“Take your coat off, Mother,” Milo said.

She took her coat off.

They ate at the table in the kitchen with the lamp on and the curtains drawn, and it was chicken and potatoes out of a pot and it was good, and Lorraine put three things on Elliot’s plate before she put anything on her own.

He ate. He said thank you. He passed the salt when Gerald looked at it. He kept his eyes on his food and his hands on the table and his answers short, and once, when Milo said something about the mower, he laughed before he thought about it, and the other three stopped.

Lorraine put her fork down and left it down a while, and then picked it up again, and nobody said anything about the mower after that.

“We eat at six,” Gerald said, near the end. He pushed his plate out and folded his hands. “Every night. Whatever else. Nobody eats standing up in this house.”

“Yes, sir,” Elliot said.

“Nobody goes out after dark.” Gerald looked at the window and not at Elliot. “Not for anything. Not if the Bell rings. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not if a Warden knocks.”

“No, sir.”

Gerald nodded once and picked his teeth with his tongue, and Elliot looked at the table and thought about what had come into this house at midnight with its shoes off, and what had gone out to meet it.

Lorraine stood up and began taking the plates. She stacked them one on top of the other and carried them to the sink and set them down, and the room went quiet and stayed quiet until she came back. Then she stood at the end of the table with her hand on the back of her chair and her sleeves pushed up to the elbow, and she said, “Say your name.”

Elliot’s hands were on the table and they were still steady, and he was aware of that and of nothing else.

“Wes Hollis,” he said.

She held on to the chair.

“Again,” she said.

“Wes Hollis.”

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she pulled the chair out and sat down in it and put her hands in her lap, and after a while Milo got up and did the dishes alone.