“Because they bought my hat designs, Deacon,” I said, and I laid my white church hat on the table beside the envelope. “Two months ago, they paid me three million, nine hundred thousand dollars for the Lenora Collection. Every church hat I ever made, in every department store in America, by next spring.” The radiator clanked. The L train rattled by the window. Deacon Freeman stood in the kitchen doorway with the payment envelope in his hand, and he looked at Kenneth, and then he looked at me, and I watched the whole thing arrange itself in his face.
Kenneth tried to laugh. “Mama, you are getting confused,” he said. “The medallion is gone. The city took it back. Deacon is thinking of some other arrangement.” “Kenneth,” said the Deacon quietly, “I have paid you eighteen hundred dollars on the first Sunday of every month for three years. I have thirty six receipts on my telephone. I have never leased any medallion from anybody but you.” The Deacon, a big man with a bass voice, spoke without any anger, only with a sorrow that filled the kitchen. “And you told me Mother Beaumont did not want to be bothered. I am so sorry, Mother.”
Rochelle sat very still in her chair. She is an accountant, a quiet woman in a navy suit, and I believe she had been doing arithmetic in her head since the moment I laid down the hat. “Kenneth,” she said, “the Escalade. The Florida trip. The new kitchen. You said it was overtime.” Kenneth said nothing. “Sixty four thousand, eight hundred dollars,” she said, very evenly. “And I put a brochure in front of your mother.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “Mother Beaumont, I did not know. I swear before God, I did not know.” I squeezed her fingers. I knew.
A white church hat set beside an envelope gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the front pew in Chicago.
I told them my terms, slowly, with my white hat on the table. The medallion would be returned to my name by the end of the week, and Deacon Freeman would pay me directly. Kenneth would repay sixty four thousand, eight hundred dollars, in monthly payments over five years, beginning with the sale of the Escalade. I would move out of the back bedroom, into a bright little condominium on King Drive, the same place that Rochelle had put in the brochure, because I did want the hat club. And Kenneth would drive a cab himself, on Saturday nights, to learn what his father had done.
Deacon Freeman put his own envelope on the table and slid it toward me. “Mother Beaumont, this month payment is yours,” he said. “The next thirty six are, too, if you will have them.” I pushed the envelope back. “Deacon, you will pay the same fair lease you paid my son, and I will be glad of it,” I said. “But I have a favor to ask.” He leaned forward. “Every Sunday, you will drive me to church in the medallion cab,” I said, “so I can see the license of Otis rolling down Michigan Avenue.” The Deacon laughed, a great bass laugh, and agreed.
On Tuesday, I walked into the hat club at the condominium, a room with sixteen round tables and a sewing machine on every one. The women there were all over seventy, and they had been making hats for each other for ten years. I told them the whole story, and when I finished, a woman named Pearlie, who is eighty seven, slapped the table and said, “Lenora Beaumont, you sold a hat for four million dollars and you have been eating canned soup?” The room exploded in laughter. I laughed hardest. Then Pearlie handed me a needle and a spool of purple thread, and said, “Now teach us how you made that bow.”
On Easter Sunday, the front pew at Greater Bethesda held twelve women in twelve hats from the Lenora Collection, and the whole church looked at them like a bank of flowers. Kenneth sat in the back, in a plain suit, with Rochelle beside him. When the pastor asked those with announcements to stand, Kenneth rose, and said in front of the whole congregation, “I would like to publicly apologize to my mother. She raised me. I failed her.” The church fell silent. Then, from the front pew, twelve women in twelve hats turned around, and began to clap.
The money consequences were firm. Kenneth sold the Escalade for a loss and bought a used Chevrolet with a cracked taillight. He took a second job driving a taxi on Saturday nights, in the very medallion that had belonged to his father, which Deacon Freeman was glad to let him use for the evening. Rochelle managed the budget, and she did it with an iron hand. Every month, an envelope arrived at my condominium, with the payment and a short note. In March, the note said, Mama, I drove past the old garage tonight. I could almost see the cab of Daddy in the window. I cried at a red light.
In the name of Otis, who passed fifteen years ago and who drove a taxi through every blizzard in Chicago for forty two years, I started the Medallion Fund. It pays for taxi rides to medical appointments for seniors in Cook County who can no longer drive and cannot afford a car service. In the first winter, we drove four hundred and ten trips. A woman of ninety, in a wheelchair, rode to her appointments for three months, and every time, the driver tipped his cap and helped her out as if she were a queen.
On a bright Sunday in June, a yellow cab pulled up in front of my condominium. Kenneth got out, in a black suit and a driver cap, and opened the rear door with a flourish. “Mother Beaumont,” he said, “your carriage.” I wore the purple hat, the one from the hatbox. As we drove down Michigan Avenue, with the lake on one side, he kept glancing at me in the mirror. “Mama, thank you for not giving up on me,” he said. I looked out the window at the passing city, and I said, “Drive carefully, son. You are carrying a lady.”
