Ramadan Ramsey Read online

  Long after fear and destiny had pulled them apart, this glimmer of religiosity would be for Alicia a means of holding them together, of coupling their spirits as righteously as they had coupled their bodies. Just as Mustafa had heard “Allah” echoed in her first name (her so-called Christian name), she would ultimately hear the Muslim month of fasting—their all-consuming month of love—echoed in her last name.

  Their child would eventually be born several weeks early, fully formed and completely healthy, as if his incubation had somehow begun with that first flirtation in the middle aisle of the Quicky Mart. And when the boy arrived, distinguished, to be sure, with the idiosyncrasies of his parents’ passion, Alicia would name him for the season of his actual conception—and Ramadan was blessed.

  2

  The House of Ramsey

  June “Joon” Ramsey was from a long line of single-mother, extended family households, so to her Alicia’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, once revealed, had the sanction of tradition. She did not know who her own father was; her mother, Lola Ramsey, had only told her, on those rare occasions when she’d been bold enough to ask, “Stay out of grown folks’ business.” Back then, the notion that parentage was not the business of a child had struck June as odd because, really, it seemed more like the only business of children. Nevertheless, it was easy for her to respect her mother’s decree, because Lola wasn’t around much anyway and when she was she avoided June, except to say things like “Go to Mama Gert,” “Get me a glass of water,” “Do your homework,” “Aww, shake it now,” and “Pull that skirt down.” These commands, which Lola had passed off as mothering, were the essential memories June attached to her, marking the stages of her development: ages four, seven, ten, eleven, and thirteen. She had vowed to press her mother for the truth on her eighteenth birthday, when, in her mind, she would be officially grown. But her mother died the summer June turned seventeen. By then she was already pregnant with Clarissa, and tongue-tied with fathering secrets of her own. But neither the inconsequential relationship she had had with Lola nor the promise of the life growing within her had kept her from sobbing in the front row at the funeral home. You would have thought she had just lost her whole world, instead of a figure who, in the truest sense, was just a “distant” relative. No, what June was really mourning was not the woman up there in the casket. Rather, it was the death of the thing Lola had symbolized most to her—not a mother, but a mystery.

  It was June’s maternal grandmother, Gertrude Ramsey, who had really raised her, instilling in her an implicit pride in the matriarchal order of things. Gertrude had insisted on being called Mama Gert, employing “Mama” as if it were a title of royalty, and she had a rough-hewn monarchal air about her. In all seasons, she wore a milk-chocolate-color floor-length housecoat of a weighty polyester. Even with its faded hemline unraveling along the lower edges, its pleated bottom swept behind her like the train of a regal robe. June, upon the death of her grandmother, had become “Mama Joon,” inheriting the title. There had been no coronation, unless you counted the ring of relatives who, in the wake of Gertrude’s passing, had rather unceremoniously begun to circle June looking for consolation, advice, supper, rent money, a cot next door for a few days, for a week, forever.

  Mama Joon the First had no castle, no court, no throne. But she had her shotgun double, a front porch, her burgundy leatherette Barcalounger, and the occasional wisdom and fallibility of a questionable queen. When she looked back on things, it was clear that Gertrude had lavished special attention on her and must have secretly selected her, from early on, as Mama successor, heiress to the rickety Ramsey empire. In the end, she hadn’t willed June much more than will, but that would prove fortune enough.

  Mama Gert had nine children by nine different men, and she kept meticulous mental records of each of these absent fathers, which was why June knew that her grandfather was a Haitian named Edgar Toussaint. As a child, she would cuddle with Mama Gert and listen to stories about him. On Sundays, with June in her lap, Mama Gert, in between taking sips of her late afternoon beer, would turn the pages of her scrapbook of men friends, eliciting from her granddaughter the same delight as when, sitting alone, she flipped through her elaborately illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for her grandmother’s cast of characters, in her telling, were as unusual and entertaining as Lewis Carroll’s. (Mama Joon had named Alicia in memory of such moments of enchantment, hoping to endow her with a taste for wild escapades—and perhaps in some small way she had.) June’s heart would throb as if enlivened with a consciousness of the very blood it was pumping whenever Mama Gert came to the old portrait of Edgar Toussaint. Flecking with age at its upper right edge, it was bifurcated by a horizontal crease just above his belt. Mama Gert would caress this fuzzy picture of the tall, cinnamony, broad-shouldered man with a pencil mustache, whose sensuality radiated through the years, out of the confines of a poorly developed sepia print. Edgar was wearing a cocked fedora and a dark suit, standing in a nondescript doorway, a cigarette pressed between shiny, black, almost three-dimensional lips that were as entrancing as blue eyes. They teased Mama Gert’s recollections, and she would say to June, “Chile, when he spoke French, everything he said sounded like ‘Open Sesame’!” She would toss her head back and cackle, and June would look up at her and laugh along, not having the faintest idea why they were both so amused. Their interplay infused itself into little June with the clarity of a melody. Every time Mama Gert invited her to sit in her lap and hummed the highlights of her story, it was as if someone were putting a needle to vinyl, tuning a radio to the best station, striking up a band.

  “He was Moses, and I was the Red Sea,” Mama Gert would add in a voice whose huskiness bore evidence of the cigarettes she smoked incessantly, wielding her Kool Filter Kings with great flair, whether in the company of others or sitting in silence all alone on her back porch. When she lit one up, she could become either the seductress of camaraderie or the slayer of loneliness. Years later, even after June was fully aware of the addictive quality of nicotine, she still thought it was as much the cigarette itself—the thing Mama Gert whisked about at a party with animated gesture, or, when no one was there for her to mesmerize, let sway downward in limp-wristed languor—not the chemical, that made the magic. If this would-be queen had a scepter, it was filtered, full-flavored, scissored between her first and middle fingers and, at its most potent, aflame.

  “Why y’all didn’t get married?” June had once dared ask her grandmother, who clearly had loved Edgar Toussaint above all the other men. Mama Gert had looked at her incredulously. “Girl, you need to pay attention. I said he was Moses, and I was the Red Sea. What that mean? He was just passing through!” Mama Gert had paused at that, before clapping and then hooting some more, all the way to a series of deep coughs—a coda to her carefree past, overture to a cancerous destiny.

  Mama Joon had known only one man who wasn’t inclined to channel his inner Moses—treating a woman as a passage to be parted, over which to cross, as a means to his own liberation, just before leaving her behind, alone, to pull herself back together. So, when Alicia began to show all the telltale signs of having delivered a man unto himself and, for all she knew, bringing him closer to his God, she knew Alicia had met her first Moses. That was the thing about a pregnancy: it announced a visitation. You didn’t have to see him to know he’d been there. At least once. He was gone now, though, and with each passing day, becoming more and more dubious, on the way to irrelevant. Mama Joon wasn’t any more interested in the identity of Alicia’s Moses than she was in the existence of ghosts. Alicia was her concern. She was there; she was real. Her child, in a short amount of time, would be there, too. Besides, she had been through this sequence of events on numerous occasions with the husbandless Clarissa, who was now comfortably situated next door with the undulating occupancy of her lively brood, five sons who moved in and out of the house depending upon their abilities to meet the demands of girlfriends, probation officers, employers,
or Clarissa herself: Clarence (“Crip”); Damon (“Diamond”); Booker T; and the twins, Romeo and Julius. Clarissa had more than a little Mama Gert in her, and her sons’ fathers were either dead or otherwise terminally detached from life as Clarissa and her children experienced it. The Ramsey commitment to matriarchy required an appropriately yet ironically Victorian steeliness. What it might have lacked in adherence to societal codes, it more than made up for in familial closeness and an occasionally toxic co-dependency.

  Mama Joon had assessed the individual spirits of Clarissa and Alicia long ago and surmised that neither was the proper heir to her minor queendom, such as it was: her position as head of the family, ownership of her mortgage-free house; the substantial savings she had stashed away. Though her daughters were so far apart in age they weren’t even in the same generation—almost eighteen years separated them—the deficiencies they held in common disheartened Mama Joon. Neither was artistic, truly industrious, or, most important, wise. The best that could be said of Clarissa was that she could scheme. And the best that could be said of Alicia was that she could love. Such extremities, devilishness and devotion, would get you laid and occasionally paid, but they could not sustain you. Either, without the temperance of wisdom, would endanger the entire household, doom the whole clan. She hadn’t suffered through decades of domestic work or endured the lengthy on-again-off-again secret affair with her married former employer—the late, esteemed Judge Emmanuel Dumas—only to have the two daughters she’d quietly borne him mismanage or squander her legacy, or theirs, for that matter. Thanks to the largesse of Judge Dumas—albeit a generosity Mama Joon had coaxed from him, beginning while his wife was still alive, with the gentle reminder of the small but revealing cache of love letters he’d ill-advisedly sent her years before—she was, financially speaking at least, very comfortable. She had eventually destroyed most of the letters he’d sent her, his teenaged maid, during the early, most passionate and satisfying days of their affair (adultery, like champagne, being at its most effervescent just after the popping of the cork).

  One later letter, she’d kept. The one Judge Dumas had written the day Alicia was born back in 1980, ironically enough, on Valentine’s Day. Maybe the coincidence of the day had touched something romantic in him, mellowed his decidedly judicial air. He had committed his full support of Alicia (and of June), so most of the money had come after that—after Mrs. Dumas had died. Relieved of the sense of his own betrayal (his puritanical reasoning, not Mama Joon’s), he had accepted Alicia with a warmth and a propriety Clarissa would never know. In the last two years of his life, he paid off her mortgage on the house, which he’d helped her buy, and gave her, on Alicia’s behalf, a thousand dollars each month, and then, just before he died, one last check for fifty thousand dollars. She had never stopped working over the years. The money she made at her hotel housekeeping job more than paid her monthly bills, so she had saved almost all of the money the judge had given her, in an interest-bearing Whitney Bank savings account. She knew she could not will anything of significance to the vulnerably lovelorn Alicia, or to the one-scam-away-from-imprisonment Clarissa. And certainly not to any of Clarissa’s criminally confused boys. Not to Crip, who had mistaken recklessness for bravery, so much so that he’d almost died for his cause when, one night three years ago, while still just “Clay,” after a fist fight in a barroom with a redbone boy called Rooster, one of his neighborhood drug-dealing rivals with a similar take on things (but evidently with a better aim) had shot Clay in both his right femur and tibia and left him for dead, and with the disability that would henceforth so crudely brand him. While Clay, reborn as “Crip,” survived, less than a month later Rooster was found dead in a burned-out Chevy parked near the lakefront. Mama Joon rarely allowed Crip to visit her house anymore for fear that Rooster’s family would retaliate while he was there. She also had no intention of squandering her savings on Damon—though she had a weak spot for him, one that enabled his own weakness. She’d been the first one to call him Diamond, until, for some reason, he’d lost his shine. Now he seemed to think getting high was a spiritual calling, so dedicated was he to maintaining an altered state of consciousness. A near monasticism guided or perhaps had resulted from his marijuana use; she knew where the money she sneaked to him without his mother knowing it was going. He was typically secluded in the back bedroom on Clarissa’s side of the house—you smelled the evidence of his presence far more that you saw him—but when you did catch sight of him, he was usually on his way someplace else. “I’ma be right back,” was his recurring but rarely kept promise; even when he was there he was gone. Conversely, Booker T, mercifully, almost never came home; he had deluded himself into believing itinerancy was adventurousness. His swagger said he’d traveled the world. If you could make yourself believe shacking with a stripper in a ratty motel on Chef Menteur Highway one week and with your baby’s mother in a Section 8 apartment in Hollygrove the next was a jaunt from one exotic locale to another, you could make yourself believe anything. When Mama Joon looked at him, she saw not Gulliver but gullibility. Romeo and Julius—each identically as handsome as the New Orleans Saints linebacker (a practice squad perennial) who had conceived them during what Mama Joon had to agree really was his “off-season”—true to the unbreakable bond of twins, had colluded in their misunderstanding that, performed properly, promiscuity was a form of philanthropy. Sadly, they had never read the play that had inspired their names. (June had—along with any number of other literary classics Judge Dumas had pressed her to read from his extensive library, in between her cooking and cleaning chores and their shared extra-domestic activities, a desultory though fulfilling syllabus that constituted the entirety of her post-tenth-grade education.) But, nevertheless, since puberty Romeo and Julius seemed committed to donating the vast wealth of their romantic charms to anyone who would have them, and evidently to at least one who would not. Mama Joon had given up on the pair completely after they—Clarissa’s youngest, while only fourteen, roughly the age of their fictional namesakes—had been arrested for rape. Star-crossed lovers indeed. Their fate was spared when the girl had suddenly dropped the charges, but only after Clarissa, who sometimes played Pitty Pat with the victim’s mother, had suspiciously borrowed one thousand dollars from Mama Joon, a likely bribe for the accuser’s retraction.

  That, Mama Joon was convinced, was how everything she had accumulated would disappear. The money, the house, any promise of Ramsey progress. After she died, in a year or two tops—poof!—it would all be gone, spent on attending to the calming of life’s calamities, applying a salve to that which could not be saved. (Calm, calamities; salve, save—she had ingested enough Shakespeare to know the poetic tricks you could employ to infuse meaning and entertainment value into your own pitiful predicament. But “To be or not to be . . .” Really? That wasn’t even a damn question!) All would be lost to beating back the encroachment of ordinary life. That seemed a contradiction, but it wasn’t. Life was a villain; existence, the damsel in distress. Existence was always on the run from life. To be was not just to be. She was very clear about that. Yet she knew that life would not leave you be. So she didn’t blame her kin, any more than you could blame victims of the Dust Bowl or of a sub-Saharan famine for their plight. Alicia, Clarissa, and those boys hadn’t invented the drought of their wisdom, the aridity of their ineptitude. She didn’t blame them—but she didn’t trust them either, any more than you could trust a big head of cabbage not to be bitter.

  She did, however, trust herself. Her reasoning, her judgment. When the right one came along, she would know, the same way Mama Gert had known she was the one. The one you doted on. The one you taught everything you knew. The one to whom you gave the keys to the kingdom of your consciousness and, in time, theirs, because you knew they would know what to do with them, which doors to open and which to leave locked.

  What she was craving went beyond the maternal. She had performed the roles of mother and grandmother as proficiently as circumstances demand
ed, depending on her mood and on her relatives’ responsiveness to her offerings. Birthday gifts and bail money were a hit. Cooking lessons and clever quips generally fell flat. Everyone appreciated the house as a place of refuge, but little effort was made to deepen the impression that it was a home.

  No, the closest 1216 St. Philip came to seeming a real home to her was when she was there alone, which was not often—but she was nobody’s introvert. She longed for the company of someone special. With Mama Gert, more than with anyone else, she had known the sensation of not being alone, the sensation of being. More than with Judge Dumas. More than with Clarissa or Alicia. More, of course, than with any of her less-than-grand grandsons. Yes, the relationship with her grandmother was the model for the one to which she found herself most open. She had once heard Judge Dumas speak of the idea of “soul mates,” and that term, as well as any, explained her feelings for Mama Gert. Oh, Judge Dumas had been talking about him and her. That’s what most people meant when they said “soul mates.” Lovers. But she and Judge Dumas had not been soul mates. He had just been trying to glorify the affair they had fallen into so haphazardly but that had nevertheless changed both their lives, created other lives. He had mistaken their proclivity for mating with each other as proof they were true mates, confused their tender exchanges of consolation for soul. June knew better. For true mates, mating was immaterial. And no, solace wasn’t soul. Opportunity wasn’t soul. Neither was mere compatibility, though harmoniousness was helpful. Soul was something else. Soul was song. Yes—and no one since Mama Gert had made her hear music.