The man in the three piece suit stopped at the edge of the open grave with the white shirt held in both hands, still in its dry cleaner plastic, perfectly creased, the arms folded across the chest as if it were sleeping. He was in his sixties, tall and silver haired, with a gold watch and a very upright bearing, and when he looked down at the casket of my grandmother, the preacher stepped back. “My name is Calvin Hayes,” he said. “I am the chief executive of a steel company in Chicago. In 1979, I was a nineteen year old boy from the East Side with one pair of pants and no shirt.” His mouth worked. “I came to Gary to interview for a job at the mill.”
The wind lifted the corner of the plastic. “I had an interview at ten in the morning with a man I had never met. I owned a gray work shirt with a torn pocket. I was going to wear it. I was standing at the bus stop on Broadway at seven, looking at a laundromat window, and I saw a woman inside, folding sheets, and she looked up and saw me.” He lifted his chin. “She came out. She said, young man, where are you headed? I told her. She looked at my shirt and she said, wait right here.” He closed his eyes. “She came back with a white shirt, dry from the machine, and an iron.”
“I stood in the back of that laundromat in my undershirt while Mrs. Ruby Washington pressed a white shirt for me,” he said. “Collar, cuffs, sleeves. She did it twice, because the first time it was not perfect. I asked what I owed her. She said, nothing, baby, give them your best. I got the job.” He opened his eyes, wet and bright. “I became a foreman. A plant manager. A vice president. And in forty five years, I have not had a single important day without a white shirt. For every board meeting, every funeral, every wedding. And every time, I thought of her.”
A white shirt in dry cleaner plastic carried to a graveside by a steel company chief gave one granddaughter the morning to bring her aunt back to the laundromat she looked down on.
My aunt Denise, standing under her black umbrella with her sunglasses still on, seemed to shrink. I stood next to her at the edge of the grave, in the dress I had borrowed from a friend, and I felt her shoulder tremble against mine. Calvin Hayes did not look at her. He turned the shirt over, gently, to show the crowd, and I saw that sewn inside the collar was a small white tag, the kind that laundries use, hand lettered in blue ink. It read, in a faded script that I knew, a script that had once written my name on every lunch bag: Ruby W. Press well. God sees the shirt.
“I kept the tag from that first shirt,” said Calvin. “She sewed it in herself, with a needle, in the back room. I took it off before I returned it, and I have worn it in my breast pocket ever since.” He reached into his jacket and brought out a worn scrap, softened by decades, the same faded script. “It has been in every suit.” He looked at the people on the road, the steelworkers and the nurses and the teachers, the women with sheet cakes and the man in the cap who said she had given him a clean shirt, too. “How many of us are there? How many of us did she send out the door in a clean shirt?”
“Hands up,” called a woman near the back. “Everyone who wore a shirt that Miss Ruby pressed.” And a forest of hands rose, a hundred, two hundred, men and women, old and young, around the grave and down the cemetery road and into the trees. Calvin Hayes nodded, tears in his eyes, and turned to me. “Destiny,” he said, because he knew my name. “Your grandmother has been paying her own way for forty years, and she has never asked anyone for anything. I think it is time we returned the favor.” He took a folded paper from his breast pocket and handed it to my aunt.
I watched her read. She read it twice. Then she took off her sunglasses, and her face was naked and old, and she looked at me with an expression I will never forget. “It is a trust,” she said. “For the laundromat. For the building. The owner has been trying to sell it for two years, and Calvin Hayes has bought it, and given it to the family, free and clear.” She swallowed. “And a scholarship, for the children of the East Side, in the name of Ruby Washington.” She pressed the paper to her mouth.
“I said she washed clothes,” my aunt whispered. “I said it to the whole world, in her own bedroom, going through her jewelry box. I said they could not afford a washing machine. I said I was not paying for chicken for the East Side.” She looked at the people. “Look at you. You are the East Side. And you have come on foot, in your good clothes, to bury her.” She dropped to her knees at the edge of the grave, on the wet grass, in her black dress. “Mama,” she said to the casket, “I am so sorry.”
I knelt beside her and held her. We rocked together, and over our heads Calvin Hayes laid the white shirt on the lid of the casket, very gently, with the sleeves crossed over its heart. The preacher, who had waited, began the committal prayer, and one by one the crowd took up the response. When the first handful of dirt fell, a steelworker in the third row began to hum, softly, a song Ruby used to sing over the washing machines, and the whole road took it up.
The laundromat reopened in April. A big banner went up across the front: Ruby Washington Wash and Fold. Free Wash Day, First Sunday. We run it on donations, and we have never once turned anyone away. My aunt Denise stands at the folding table every Sunday in an apron and a pair of gloves, folding the clothes of strangers with the corners square. On the wall behind the register, in a glass frame, hang a small white tag and a scrap of faded script. A boy of about eight came in last week with a ragged shirt in a paper bag. I took it from him. I pressed it. He put it on, and he stood up straighter.