The Women of Brewster Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

have to do for it. And you are mine, ain’t you?” she whispered to the sleeping baby. “All mine.”
    “That’s right, all yours—built-in heartache for the next twenty years. Now me, when I want ready-made trouble, I dig up a handsome man. No diapers to change, and I can walk when I’m ready. And that’s just about what I’m fixin’ to do; Bennett is starting to fray my nerves.”
    Mattie looked up, stricken. “You leaving?”
    “Yeah, honey. I was ready months ago, but when you wrote and said you were comin’, I stuck around to see you settled with the baby. But this town is dead.”
    “Where to now, Etta?” she asked with a sigh.
    “Honey, New York is the place to be! All those soldier boys are just pullin’ up to the docks with pocketfuls of combat pay and lookin’ for someone to help ’em invest it. And there’s a place called Harlem with nothing but wall-to-wall colored doctors and real estate men. Why don’t you come with me, Mattie? With all them possibilities, you bound to find Basil a rich daddy.”
    Etta’s enthusiasm had almost convinced her, but then she caught herself. “Oh, no,” Mattie shook her head, “I’m not dragging my baby all over the country behind you. When you first left home, you wrote and said St. Louis was the place to be, and then it was Chicago, and then here. Now it’s New York. You ain’t gonna find whatever it is you lookin’ for that way.”
    “Well, I ain’t gonna find it sittin’ here, either. And neither will you.”
    “I ain’t lookin’ for nothing, Etta.” She stared down at her son. “I got everything I need right here. And I’m content to stay put with what God gave me.”
    “Well,” Etta said, going toward the door, “the way I heard it, God got out of the baby business after Jesus was born, but maybe you know something I don’t.” And she winked and left.
    “What I know,” Mattie said to the closed door, “is that this boy did come C.O.D., and I’m willin’ to stay here and pay for it.”
    Etta left Mattie six weeks later with eight cases of condensed milk and coupon books for fifty pounds of sugar. Mattie didn’t dare ask where they had come from because she knew Etta would tell her. In the loneliness that rushed in to fill the vacuum her friend had left, she found herself thinking of home, and she longed to see her mother. She wrote and asked her to come stay with the baby while she went to work because she didn’t want to leave him with strangers. Her mother wrote back that she wanted to come, but her father was doing poorly and she couldn’t leave him, but, please, send the baby down there while she worked.
    Mattie looked around at the cramped boardinghouse room with its cheap furniture and dingy walls that no amount of scrubbing seemed to lighten, and she thought of the organdy curtains and the large front yard in her parents’ home—the clean air and fresh food. But each day her baby was beginning to look unmistakably like Butch, and she thought of the unbending old man who would sit with his Bible clenched in his fist and watch him grow up.
    “I can’t put you through that,” she whispered. “Right now I can’t give you much, but you’re too little to see this room anyway. All you see is your mama, right? And you know Mama loves you and accepts you—no matter how you got here.”
    As if in answer Basil began to kick his arms and legs and whine. Mattie picked him up and pressed his soft body to her bosom, molding him into her heart as he went to sleep.
    She found an assembly-line job in a book bindery, and she paid Mrs. Prell, an old woman on the first floor, to keep him during the day. Mattie thought the woman appeared a bit senile, and she had three cats. To save carfare, Mattie would walk the thirty blocks back to the boardinghouse to see the baby during her lunch break. She had just enough time to rush in, pick him up, see if he was wet or marked in someway, and then go back to work. She resorted to eating her