A Work in Progress, Barry Rachin [ereader android TXT] 📗

precious pearl-of-a-poem Eudora shared with her in the frigid parking lot.


Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on
in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather
made banked fires blaze.
No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Tawana read the poem through a second time and then a third. Yes, it was a masterpiece—a cri de coeur as poignant and resonant as any full-length novel. A simple and unadorned poem written by an unassuming black man over half a century ago! No flowery rhetoric or purple prose, just a sixteen line barrage of innate wisdom.

“That lovely poem Eudora Grossberg recited… I just found it on the internet.” Tawana was lying in bed next to her husband. “The imagery was so beautiful it took my breath away.”

“That’s nice.” Ellis had been fading off to sleep.

“Here’s the crazy thing,” Tawana drew the conversation back to her original remarks. “A casual reader would never imagine that an Afro-American had written the poem.”

“Your point?”

“Robert Hayden came from the ghetto. His parents fought constantly throughout his childhood.”

“How do you know all this?”

“After finding the poem, I researched his bio on the internet.”

Throughout childhood, the poet's home was filled with the ‘chronic angers’ and violence he hinted at in his poems. Nearsighted and short of stature, Hayden was ostracized by his peers at school and suffered debilitating bouts of depression.

“From such a life he fashioned exquisite poetry.” In the street a dog barked setting off a cacophony of yips and yaps as far as several streets away. There were other thoughts that Tawana Saunders meant to share with her husband, but a snuffling sound followed by the man’s steady breathing indicated Ellis had drifted off to sleep.

What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

What did it take to write a sentence half that beautiful?

Perhaps she would consult Eudora Grossberg, who dressed like a bag lady and chased down runaway shopping carts in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. Yes, she must make a mental note to do just that. No, better to get up out of bed right this very minute and scribble a brief reminder - something, anything to jog her memory so that in the morning when she was rushing about getting her daughter’s breakfast together, feeding the dog, washing the early morning dishes …

Before she could put a period to the sentence, Tawana Saunders had slid off the shelf of consciousness and joined her husband in sleep.

* * * * *


In the morning, Tawana reviewed work schedules for the coming week. Myra Dobbins from the dairy department was going out on maternity leave, and one of the meat cutters slashed a finger to the bone the previous Wednesday trimming a pot roast. When Eudora Grossberg took coffee break at ten forty-five, the store manager slipped the girl a small manila folder. “Some recent writing. Mostly character sketches and dialogue.”

Eudora took the folder and laid it on the table next to her food. “Give me a day or two.”
“One question.” The store manager smoothed the front of her dress with the flat of her hands. “You are obviously an intelligent woman. There are conservatively a dozen positions here at the market you’d qualify for, if you wanted to earn a bit more money.”

“And if I didn’t know any better,” Eudora replied unscrewing the cap on her thermos, “I might imagine you playing Henry Higgins to my Liza Doolittle.” There was no trace of resentment in her tone. The My Fair Lady quip was self-mocking.

Tawana chuckled and shook her head. “Touché. I was totally out of place.”

“No offense taken.”

Tawana sat down on the chair next to her. “I hunted down the Hayden poem on the internet.”

Eudora crooked her head to one side and winked at the store manager, a conspiratorial gesture. “Doesn’t get much better than that.”

“No it doesn’t, does it?”

* * * * *

Where’s Eudora?” Tawana asked early Monday morning.

“Called out sick,” Gail said. “She’s got that twenty-four hour bug that’s going around. Poor kid! Couldn’t stop coughing in the message she left on the answering machine.” She leaned over the counter. “Did you read that article about her in the Sunday paper?”

“Yes, it was quite something,” Tawana replied. A New York literary agent had noticed Eudora Grossberg’s story when it first appeared in the Yale Review and, on the merits of the single work, offered her a book deal. A collection of short stories and poetry was scheduled for release in the spring. “Where does Eudora live?”

“Buckley Place.” Lois replied.

Tawana drummed her fingers on the Formica counter. “That old mill complex that was renovated into apartments?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Over by the railroad tracks, Buckley Place was a grimy, low-rent residence, mostly tiny efficiency apartments. Tawana went back to her office, closed the door and called Eudora at the number listed in her personnel file. An answering machine picked up. She replaced the receiver on the phone without leaving a message. Around four in the afternoon, she made her way to the deli counter. “What are the soups?”

“Beef barley and chicken escarole,” the man behind the counter replied.

“Give me a quart of each.”

Tawana left work early and drove across town to Buckley Place and parked her Toyota Celica in a lot marked ‘visitor parking’. The building, which had been given a cosmetic face lift only a few years earlier, already exuded a down-at-the-heels shabbiness. The lobby was dimly lit making it next to impossible to read the tenant directory.

“Got a cigarette?” Like an apparition from the nether world, a disheveled, middle-aged man with a lumpy, disfigured nose lurched out from an open doorway. He smelled of rancid body odor and his shirt pocket was torn away in a useless flap.

What was I thinking, coming here alone without mentioning it to anyone? “Don’t smoke.” Tawana edged away and, while still eyeing the man, groped for the doorknob leading back out into the street.

“Who’re you looking for?” The fellow’s eyes, bulgy and jaundiced, never strayed from her face.

Tawana took a tentative step backwards but the queer fellow immediately closed the gap and was hovering so close she could feel his sour breath on her cheek. “Eudora Grossberg,” she mumbled still fumbling for the illusive doorknob. “I brought her some soup.”

The man swayed back and forth as though in a drug-induced stupor. “Dora? She’s up in 3B.” Turning away, he hurried to the far end of the foyer and jabbed the elevator button several times. “Dora’s sick bad. Threw up twice last night. Can’t keep nothin’ down.”

When the elevator door opened, the strange fellow stumbled in and held the door open for her. “Say, you wouldn’t have a cigarette to spare? I’m just about crapping my pants for a butt.”

Tawana was feeling light headed. “You already asked me a moment ago, and I told you I don’t smoke.”

Looking muddled, the man scratched an earlobe. “Funny, I don’t remember.”

The carpet on the third floor landing was torn and one of the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling flickered erratically. He shambled down the unheated hallway a short distance and knocked at a door.

“Who’s there?”

“Just me,” the fellow replied, “and some fancy-shmancy lady. She didn’t offer no name and I didn’t ask.”

The door opened. Dressed in flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers, Eudora Grossberg squinted myopically out at them. “I heard you were sick so brought fresh soup from the market.”

If Eudora was shocked to see the store manager standing in the dank hallway, she didn’t show it. “How sweet! Sure, come in.” She held the door wide, and the odd fellow trailed Tawana into the efficiency apartment, flopping down on a chair near the window. “I see you’ve met Dennis.”

The man with the shapeless nose grinned sheepishly, pushing his bottom lip out in a perverse caricature of a smile. "So how you doing?”

“Hungry as hell.” Eudora removed a couple of spoons and bowls from a cupboard, poured a generous portion of chicken escarole into each, handing one to Dennis. They ate in total silence. When the soup was gone, Eudora had a mild coughing fit then turned to the man with the unflattering nose. “You didn’t jump out in the hallway and scare Mrs. Saunders, did you, Dennis?”

“Oh no,” he blustered. “Didn’t do no such thing!”

“Actually, he was quite polite,” Tawana protested. “Even told me what apartment you lived in and escorted me up here like a perfect gentleman.” Dennis sat up straighter in his chair and puffed out his lower lip, which was still moist from the soup. Then he rose and, without saying goodbye, wandered out of the apartment leaving the door wide open.

Eudora shut the door. “Dennis, he’s a little …”

“Yes, I can see that,” Tawana said.

“I had a chance to read through your material.” She lifted the manila folder off a shelf and handed it back to the black woman. “From a technical standpoint, the writing is solid, but the author is among the missing.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“About the Robert Hayden poem,” Tawana continued. “It took my breath away.”

Eudora put the soup in the refrigerator and rinsed out the bowls. “That visceral quality ... it’s what’s missing in your writing.”

“What do you suggest?”

Eudora sat down on the edge of the bed. “Don’t play it safe. Write from your private anguish… confusion and darkest fears.”

“Like Hayden does.”

“It’s a good place to start,” Eudora confirmed.”

The apartment was tiny. The bedroom and kitchen merged into one living space with a closet and claustrophobic bathroom near the rear wall. By the window a computer rested on a table. It was a Windows 98 model, a prehistoric relic that backed up off old-fashioned plastic diskettes and couldn’t support any of the sophisticated thirty-two bit software programs that had emerged in recent years. The supermarket had shifted over to the Microsoft XP software in two thousand six and junked all the outmoded machines. Next month they would switch again to the Vista operating system - more elaborate gadgetry, bells and whistles.

“We’re all works in progress.” Eudora Grossberg was sitting up on the center of the bed now in a modified lotus position. There was something transcendently beautiful about the awkward, introverted woman.

Works in progress. Sadly, not all mortal creatures turn out all that well. A fleeting image of a defiant Reginald Owens flitted across her mind. A minute passed. Dennis returned with a fresh cigarette. He sat down at the kitchen table and smoked voraciously, discarding the burnt ash into an empty coffee cup. “This cigarette’s got menthol,” Dennis noted. “I don’t like menthol. It tickles my tongue.”

“I want to apologize again for