The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,16
There were also his wife’s old clothes and shoes, and box after box of photographs that he’d taken, collected, and gathered from family members and the children of old friends.
“Why you keep all this old junk, Uncle?” Reggie used to ask him.
“It’s my whole family, boy,” he’d once said. “Everything about them. Without they papers they, they . . . you know what I mean.”
“No, Uncle. It’s just moldy old clothes you ain’t nevah gonna wear and papers you ain’t nevah gonna read again. I could get you a storage space and put it all in there. Then you could walk around in here.”
“What if your mama wanted to put you in a, in a . . . a sto’ place?”
“My mama’s dead, but I’m alive, Papa Grey.”
Patting the door to his deep closet Ptolemy said, “All my stuff is livin’ too.”
Someone knocked and the news announcer stopped making sense. Ptolemy turned his head toward the door and stared at it. His legs wanted to get up and go but his mind said stay down. His tongue wanted to call out, “Who is it?” But his teeth clamped shut.
Ptolemy’s dark features twisted in the attempt to remember why he wasn’t going to answer.
The knock came again. He once had a doorbell but it broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix it because he was mad that he couldn’t raise the rent and so he said that he wasn’t going to fix anything.
“I’m losing money on this place and that’s not why I own it,” he shouted at Reggie one day.
“Get the fuck outta here, man,” Reggie had said, and the white landlord, Mr. Pierpont, got the cops.
The police threatened Reggie, but then Pierpont tried to make them get rid of Ptolemy too.
“You’re trying to evict this old man?” one of the cops had asked.
“I’m losing money on this place,” Pierpont said, as if Ptolemy had stabbed him.
“If I was this young man I would have done more than threaten you,” the cop said. The police left, and potbellied Joseph Pierpont never came back, or answered any calls.
Now the doorbell no longer worked and people had to knock. And when they’d knock, Ptolemy would get up and go to the front and ask, “Who is it?”
But not this time. This time he stayed in his seat, listening to the newsman’s gibberish and music that scratched at his ears.
The knock came again and Ptolemy remembered why he stayed in his chair. That big boy Hilly had been there and knocked and said that he wanted to come in. He’d come three days in a row and each day Ptolemy told him that he didn’t need him and that he would call if he did.
“But you don’t know my numbah, Papa Grey,” Hilly said through the door. “You haven’t called up in years.”
“I know how to phone for a operator. All you have to do is dial oh. I call her if I wanna talk to you.”
“Mama told me to come help you,” Hilly, the thief, beseeched. “She be mad at me if I don’t.”
“I don’t need no help.”
“How can you go to the sto’?”
“I walk there.”
“What about the bank?”
“You stoled my money, boy. You stoled it at the bank.”
“I didn’t.”
“I don’t need yo’ kinda help,” Ptolemy said, and after three days he no longer even asked who it was. He just stared at whoever was giving the news and waited for the caller to go away and for the words to make sense again.
The first time someone knocked on the door after Reggie’s wake it wasn’t Hilly.
“Who is it?”
“Mr. Grey?” a man’s voice said.
“You Mr. Grey too?” Ptolemy asked.
“No,” the man said patiently, “you’re Mr. Grey. Open the door, please.”
Ptolemy almost obeyed; the voice was that certain.
“Who are you?”
“Antoine Church, Mr. Grey. Your nephew, Reginald, applied to the social services office for a doctor for you a while ago. Is Reginald around?”
“Reggie’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Is someone else taking care of you?”
“I don’t need no one to take care’a me. Reggie’s dead and now there’s just me.”
The radio was playing a march and someone on the TV was laughing. Ptolemy pressed his ear against the door.
“I’ve found a doctor who wants to see you, Mr. Grey,” Antoine Church said. “He’s a memory specialist, and he has a grant, so his services are free.”
“I’m not sick. I don’t need no doctor.”
“Let me in, Mr. Grey,” the voice said. “Let me in and we can sit down and talk about it.”