Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Thirty-six hundred each,” Mossa said.

“Cash,” Ptolemy added.

The antiquarian put the CLOSED sign on the front door and brought Ptolemy and the girl into a yard that was filled with flowering plants that Robyn could not identify. There Mossa made tea and brought out strange-tasting pastries.

Mossa asked Robyn about her college aspirations, and even offered to give her a recommendation for school.

“I’m only goin’ to junior college,” she said.

“But you will transfer one day.”

“Yeah,” she said, surprise coming through in her voice, “I might.”

“This is my daughter, Mossa,” Ptolemy said at one point. “Give her your card and do business wit’ her fair an’ square like you always done wit’ me.”

Mossa did not speak. He smiled, took a business card from his vest pocket, and handed it to the girl. The white card was engraved with golden letters. She placed it in her bag next to the knife—her mother’s only gift.

On the street again, waiting for a westbound bus, Robyn and Ptolemy sat side by side, holding hands.

“How you get to know Mr. Mossa, Uncle?”

“Every once in a blue moon I’d get a part-time job at a restaurant they used to have around here called Trudy’s Steak House. If they had a big weekend and one’a their people got sick they’d call me ’cause I was a friend of a guy worked there called Mike Tinely.

“I always took the early bus because the boss wanted you there on the minute. One time I saw Mossa’s place and I wondered if he could cash my coin. A week aftah my job was ovah I went in the store. It was him there, an’ he walked up to me and said, ‘Can I help you, Father?’

“That was twenty-four years ago. He was in his fifties and I was already retired. We talked for a while and then he put up the CLOSED sign and took me to his garden for some tea. I nevah met anybody like that. My skin didn’t mean nuthin’ to him. I knew what the coins were worth from books, but I didn’t tell him that. He paid me top dollar and we been friends evah since.”

“Where you get them coins?” Robyn asked.

“Later, child. Let’s get out to Santa Monica first.”

An hour later they were walking on a street in Santa Monica. They came to a slender brick building between a women’s clothes store and a shop that sold leather goods in all forms and shapes. Robyn stopped at the window of the clothes store, gazing at a dress that was diaphanous and multicolored. Ptolemy stood back, watching her turn slightly as if she had tried on the frock and was checking her reflection in the glass.

Abromovitz and Son Legal Services was on the fourth floor of the slender building. There was an elevator but it was out of order, and so the young girl and the old man took the stairs, half a flight at a time. Ptolemy counted the steps, seven and then eight three times, with one-minute rests between each.

The door was open and Ptolemy led the way into the dimly lit room.

“May I help you?” a middle-aged black woman asked. She was sitting behind an oak desk that blocked the way to a bright-green door that was closed.

Ptolemy smiled at the woman, who was maybe forty-five.

Half my age, he thought, and twice my weight.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’d like to speak with Abraham,” he said, echoes of Coy’s blasphemous Bible lessons resounding in his mind.

“He,” the woman said, and then winced. “Mr. Abromovitz passed away five years ago.”

“Oh,” Ptolemy said, “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. I liked him very much.”

The black woman, whose skin was quite dark and whose name-plate said Esther, nodded and smiled sadly.

“Yes,” she said. “He always asked how I was in the morning, and he would listen too.”

“Moishe still here?” Ptolemy asked.

The receptionist registered surprise at the question.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Mr. Ptolemy Grey.”

Mr. Grey,” a middle-aged, paunchy white man was saying a few moments later, after Esther had made a call on the office line.

Robyn followed her adopted father into the small dark office. There was a window but it only looked out onto a shadowy air-shaft. Bookcases lined every wall. Along with law books, there were novels, piles of magazines, and stacks of typing paper held together by old brittle rubber bands. The room reminded Robyn somewhat of Ptolemy’s home before she had cleaned it out, and a little of Mossa’s rooms filled with ancient treasures.

The only free space on the wall held a painting of a naked white goddess standing in the foreground with a medieval village behind her. The people of the village seemed unaware of the voluptuous maiden passing before them.

“I haven’t seen you since I was a young man,” Moishe Abromovitz was saying. “I think I was still in school.”

His face was young but his hair had gone gray and the backs of his hands were prematurely liver-spotted.

Ptolemy pressed Robyn toward one of the four visitors’ chairs and then took one himself. Moishe remained standing next to a pine desk that was probably older than he was.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Grey?”

“I’m sorry to hear about your father,” Ptolemy said. “I didn’t know.”

“I thought we sent you a notice,” the fortyish man in the aged body said. “I hope we didn’t forget you.”

Ptolemy wondered if the letter had come in and Reggie had read it to him. Remembering himself as a feebleminded old fool was painful and frightening; next to that memory, Death didn’t seem like such a bad fellow.

“You still got that file on me?” Ptolemy asked.

“My father had sixteen clients that he wanted me to take special care of after he was gone. You were one,” Moishe Abromovitz said as he went to a wooden file cabinet behind the elder desk. He drew out an old manila folder, about three inches thick, and placed it on the pine desk. “He said that you were a gentle man with a good heart and that I should handle your estate when the time came.”

“You mean when I died.”

Moishe sat down behind the file and smiled.

Ptolemy put his left hand on Robyn’s forearm. The girl seemed uncomfortable and he wanted to put her at ease.

“This child has saved me,” Ptolemy said. “I was sick, very sick and she cleaned my house and brought me to a doctor that made me well, or at least as well as a man my age can be.”

Moishe’s smile evaporated.

“I want you to make her my heir,” Ptolemy said. “Put her in that trust your daddy said he made for me, and take care’a her business like you did with mine.”

Moishe nodded noncommittally and Ptolemy placed a stack of ten one-hundred-dollar bills on the table.

“This should cover the first part’a the work you got to do.”

The legal adviser turned to Robyn and asked, “What is your name?”

“Robyn Small,” Ptolemy said before she could answer. “That’s Robyn like the bird only with a y instead of an i. An’ she got all her information in her bag.”

“Robyn, would you mind waiting outside for a moment while I talk to Mr. Grey alone?”

The girl nodded and stood right up. She walked from the room, closing the door behind her without a word or gesture of complaint.

After she was gone Moishe turned to Ptolemy.

“How well do you know this girl, Mr. Grey?”

“That’s not the question you should be askin’ me, young man.”

Moishe frowned and said, “No?”

“Uh-uh. No. I know what you thinkin’. You thinkin’ that I’m a old man and this young thing is after anything she can get outta me. But how good I know her ain’t what will tell you what you need to know.”

Moishe smiled as if he perceived something he recognized in the old man’s words.

“What should I have asked, Mr. Grey?”

“What you wanna know is how well I know anybody. Not just Robyn but ev’rybody in my life. You know, a old man don’t have much to go on. He don’t have a big social life. He don’t cut the rug no mo’.”

“Cut the rug?” the lawyer asked.

“Dance.”

“I never danced very much,” Moishe said apologetically. “My father did. He was a wonderful dancer. But I have two left feet.”

“There’s a lady upstairs from me get my mail two times a week,” Ptolemy continued. “Her name’s Falona Dartman. I’d like to leave her a li’l sumpin’ when I pass. And there’s a woman dope addict across the street try to mug me every time I stick my nose out the door. I don’t wanna give her nuthin’. My grandniece Niecie Brown don’t know what’s goin’ on, and her son stoled money from me because he thought I was too old to notice. My other great-grandnephew, Reggie, took care’a me for years. He had a good heart but he didn’t know what he was doin’ and now he’s dead anyway—shot down in the street.”

“Oh my God,” the younger Abromovitz declared. “That’s terrible.”

“Robyn cleaned out my house and took me to a doctor. She beat up that dope fiend and cooks for me twice a day. I offered her all my money and she turned it down. But, you know, Reggie, my great-grandnephew, have left two babies behind him, and my grandniece needs looking after too. Robyn the only one will see my family is taken care of.”

“But how long have you known her, Mr. Grey?” Moishe insisted.

“You see that paintin’ on the wall, Moishe?” Ptolemy replied.

“Yes.”

“It’s called A Study of Darkness in Light.”

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“Your father bought it from a painter friend of his named Max Kahn. I remember Maxie. Him an’ me an’ your daddy used to go to this bar down on the boardwalk and drink beers and talk nonsense.”

“Max Kahn,” Moishe whispered. “I remember him. My mother never liked Max.”

“Your father told me that he bought the paintin’ because of the naked woman, said he liked to have a nude to look at all day. Your mother didn’t like the girlie magazines your father bought, but she couldn’t argue with oil paintin’s.”

Moishe smiled and nodded. It was as if Ptolemy had become a doorway to his lost youth.

“But as the years went by, Abe found himself looking more at the background, at the people in the town who had a light shined on ’em by the deity but didn’t know it. There’s a old woman leading a young woman toward a doorway. One day your father noticed that the young woman was blind. There’s a poor man leanin’ down to pick up a wallet—”

“That a wealthy merchant had dropped on the street,” Moishe said, remembering the words of his father for the first time in many years.

“There’s a watchmaker with no hands explaining to his young assistant how to fix a clock, and a dog headed down a dark alley-way. At the end of that alley is a woman’s face glowing and smilin’ down on the cur.”

“You remember all that, Mr. Grey?”

“Your father lost interest in the naked woman, but he saw somethin’ new in that paintin’ almost every week. He realized after Max died that he was a real artist whose work spoke out aftah death.”

There was benign joy in the face of Moishe Abromovitz. He nodded and smiled at the old man.

“Okay,” he said. He picked up the phone and pressed a button and said, “Esther, ask Miss Small to join us, will you?”

You sure it was all right, signin’ all them papers, Uncle Grey?” Robyn asked on the bus ride back to South Central L.A.

“You mean because he’s a white man and he might cheat us?”

Robyn nodded and the old man smiled.

“No, baby. Moishe ain’t gonna cheat us. All you got to do is tell him money you get from Mossa and get him to make out what the taxes ought to be. He’ll charge you maybe thirty dollahs an’ send you the forms to send in your taxes once every three months. That’s the deal me and his father made. I never did it, though. You the one. You the one gonna make Coy’s dream into somethin’ real.”

“What happened to Coy?” Robyn asked.

The pain that invaded his chest was sharp and sudden, like a knife stab.

“What’s wrong, Uncle Grey?”

“Pain,” he uttered.

“From what?”

“I cain’t talk about what happened, Robyn. I cain’t.”

The girl took his right hand and pressed the thick muscle in the webbing between his index finger and thumb.

The hurt, and then the release from the girl’s massage, eased his memory of Coydog dancing on feet of fire, being strangled by a white man’s noose.

“He died,” Ptolemy whispered. “He’s gone.”

When they got to Ptolemy’s block Robyn took out her knife and held it so that it was hidden by her wrist and forearm.

“He try an’ mess wit’ us an’ I cut that mothahfuckah like a Christmas goose,” she said to Ptolemy as they walked.

“You evah et goose?” the old man asked.

“No,” she said.

This caused Ptolemy to laugh. He giggled and tittered, and then so did Robyn. They were like childhood friends remembering days long ago and carefree. In this way they made it to Ptolemy’s door with no attacks or retaliations.

There was a small can on the floor in front of Ptolemy’s door.

“What’s this?” Robyn said to herself, kneeling down.

“Is it a peanut can?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a treat Miss Dartman bring down for me sometimes. Hand it here.”

Ptolemy put out his hand and dutifully his newly adopted daughter complied. He could feel the heft of the ammunition Hilly had left him.

“It’s heavy, Uncle,” Robyn said. “What is it?”

“Nuthin’. Nuthin’ at all.”

The phone rang later that night as Ptolemy watched a comedy show on TV with Robyn. Watching television was the closest thing to revisiting his previous state of dementia. The people spoke too fast and the jokes weren’t funny at all. People dressed like they were going to fancy parties but instead they were at work or walking down the street in broad daylight. Everybody was in love all the time, and in pain too. The stories never went anywhere, but Robyn laughed and giggled from the first moment to the last. He liked to see the young woman laughing. It was to him like a gift from God, and so he liked watching TV with her, when her hard life let up for a moment and she didn’t need her anger or her knife.

Ptolemy was just getting ready to get up and say good night when the phone rang. Robyn bounced off the couch and answered.

“It’s for you, Papa Grey.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, Ptolemy,” a woman’s voice greeted.

“Hi. How are ya, Shirley?”

“Just fine. I was bakin’ me some fudge here and I thought about you. Do you like chocolate?”

“I like you, and if you make chocolate, then I like that too.”

“You must’a been a mess when you were a young man, Mr. Grey.”

“No. Not me. When I was younger I couldn’t take three steps without trippin’. I was quiet and shy, couldn’t put my words together for love or money.”