by Lore Segal
“Headache is terrific. I better get that bird in the oven!”
“I gave Annie the liver,” said Sarah.
“Ah, yes?” said Ebony.
“There was nothing else,” said Sarah.
“No problem,” said Ebony. “What’s wrong with a nice bread-and-herb stuffing? We got parsley, we got chives…”
“I’m sorry, Ebony. Annie! SHUT UP!”
Now there entered Carter ex machina, large and urbane, to be introduced. The little lilac lady rolled her eyes and made a moue and said that she was pleased to meet him, from which Carter deduced that she came from London, where, he said, he and his ex-wife had spent two years on dear old Finchley Road. Mrs. Daniels absolutely flushed with the pleasure of the coincidence: she had been born quite near, on Primrose Hill! Carter’s smile suggested it was not coincidence, it was not intuition, but a certain expertise, he happened to have, in placing a person’s birth within a two-mile radius anywhere in the United Kingdom, from the way they pronounced “Pleased to meet you.” He poured her a glass of predinner wine, and one for himself, and walked Mrs. Daniels out onto the mellow evening slope, not two moments before Sarah laid her head on the table and sobbed.
“Oh, come. Don’t.” Victor caressed her back. “She is human, and she is not stupid. She will understand.”
“No, she’s not stupid! She’ll understand we are a mess.”
Ebony sent both of them upstairs to get Annie to bed and to freshen themselves up.
“Can I help?” asked Ilka.
“Yes,” said Ebony. “You can set the table. Here are Aunt Abigail’s linen napkins. Get some blossoms from that bush outside your cottage. We’re going to put on the dog for the agency lady.”
* * *
—
The enormous chicken didn’t make it to the table till well past ten o’clock. It was a magnificent, a baroque bird, copper-colored, glistening; it sizzled. The men, as by unspoken agreement, had put their jackets on, and with shirts opened at the throat looked decorous and at ease. Ebony in a white cotton dress wore her hair, as she had worn it at the benefit, pulled into a cap that fit close to her excellent small skull. Ilka kept staring at Ebony. It was a gay and gala meal. The spirited talk, pitched at a decent volume, flowed naturally around the petrified Sarah and Victor and buoyed their guest. Mrs. Daniels looked pink with pleasure. She told them something: when she was a girl she had loved learning Shakespeare speeches by heart.
“Would you have liked to be an actress?” Ebony asked her.
No. No, it wasn’t that Mrs. Daniels had wanted to act, or to be onstage, no, really, not at all. She had been such a shy, tongue-tied girl! It had been a relief to talk in Viola’s or Portia’s voice.
Did she remember any of her speeches? Could she say one? Mrs. Daniels could, and did, and did not roll her eyes or make a single moue, though it was a very long speech. Ilka sneaked a look and saw Ebony listening with none of the embarrassment that kept Ilka staring into her plate.
Mrs. Daniels acknowledged the applause with a pleased flush. Well, she said, but you couldn’t go through life speaking Shakespeare. It wasn’t that it got at all easier as one got older; one never really grew any less shy or stopped feeling embarrassed all the time. It’s just one learned to just be shy and feel embarrassed and to take no notice and get on and do what needed doing, wasn’t that right?
That was quite right. “Now!” Ebony said. “Victor, Sarah!” They jumped.
“Take Mrs. Daniels into the living room. You must have so much to talk about.”
Mrs. Daniels demurred. First, they must all help wash up this wonderful, wonderful meal.
“Heavens to Betsy! No!” cried Ebony. “That is my department! Baby, you make one of your beautiful living-room fires.”
“Oh, but we mustn’t, you know, keep you out of your own living room!” Mrs. Daniels made a moue and rolled her eyes.
“No problem!” said Ebony. “We’re ever so much happier in the kitchen…Just the bittiest little swipe!” Ebony said to Carter after the small commotion that had convulsed Victor and Sarah into action and gentled their guest out of the room. “Didn’t beat that boy but just this once, all evening long! I was good! Wasn’t I good?”
“You were wonderful,” said Carter. “We were all wonderful.”
“Man, didn’t we rally!” Percy said.
“We rallied,” Carter said.
“Rallied right around!” said Ebony.
“Man!” said Percy. “When we rally, we surely do rally!”
They laughed sotto voce, but they laughed and laughed with the relief—Ilka understood that—of being three Negroes among themselves, except for herself, who did not count, and it was to insist on her existence that Ilka opened her mouth and said, “Now your hair looks nice.”
“Why, thank you kindly,” Ebony said and nodded, and said, “That’s what my mother used to say when I got home from the barbershop Saturdays, with my scalp on fire from conking the wrong kind of curl out of my hair.”
Carter explained, “Conking is a chemical process that relaxes Negro hair.”
“Aha!” said Ilka.
“Nine to twelve every Saturday morning. Every Sunday morning, before church, my mother yanked the comb through every last strand, heated up the curling iron, and ironed in the right kind of curl, then she’d say, ‘Now your hair looks nice.’ Somebody, some one of these days, is going to do a book about our hair, and when they do they better know what they are talking about. Anybody talks to me about my hair is walking into a buzz saw.”
“I got me a notion,” said Carter, “one of these days our hair is going to stand up and start the revolution.” Ilka looked to see if he was laughing. Carter was not laughing.
* * *
—
Ilka lay in bed with Carter and said, “About Ebony. You think to me she is hostile?”
“Yes!” said Carter.
* * *
—
There had been two occurrences in the night for Ebony to report to Carter and Ilka, when she filled their cups at the kitchen table. “Doris Mae is back,” she said.
“And how is Doris Mae?” asked Carter.
“Doris Mae is just fine,” said Ebony with a nodding action that engaged her upper body to the waist. “You’ll see just as soon as she comes down from carrying Percy his juice, and,” said Ebony, “I got into bed with the agency lady.”
“Tell the whole story,” said Carter.
“Well, you just know I will!” said Ebony. “Don’t nothing stop me telling the whole story. If there’s a story, you just know I’m going to tell the whole of it.”
“You don’t hear me complaining.” Stanley put down The New York Times and interlocked his hands behind his head.
Ilka, who was jealous, said, “Today can we have lunch at that inn?,” depressed by her skimpy voice compared with the range of Ebony’s brass-and-velvet tones.
“I’m lying in my bed,” said Ebony, “wondering what is going to happen to me if I don’t get some sleep sometime soon…”
“Oh, man!” said Carter.
“Stanley is snorting to beat the band, so I wrap up in my blanket, take my pillow under my arm, and walk into the spare room, and I’m lifting my knee, hoisting myself onto the bed when the agency lady sits up and says, ‘Eeeps!’”
Carter roared. Stanley grinned. Ilka kept smiling.
Ebony said, “So I come on downstairs. I’m going to give the porch swing a try. Going to face that old New England moon—I’m going to spit in his eye—and I walk out the front door and there is no moon? What have they done with the Connecticut moon? What have they done with Connecticut? Where did they put Thomastown! Did you ever look out the front door around midnight? There—is—nothing—out—there! Did you know the abyss starts right where our front porch stops—right where there’s that nice slope in the daytime.
“Man, it is black, but I mean pitch out there, and something is throbbing—something is chugging louder, louder, louder, and it’s Doris Mae’s
taxi from the station, so we went in and had a nice long cup of tea, Doris Mae, didn’t we? Carter, don’t you just love the way they did Doris Mae’s hair for her in Boston?”
“They certainly did,” said Carter.
“It’s just it’s cool for the summer,” said Doris Mae. “Off my neck.”
“Well, I think it’s darling! I think it suits the bones of your face. Carter, don’t you think it suits Doris Mae’s bones?”
“It’s easy to keep,” said Doris Mae.
“I think it’s darling,” Ebony said.
“Percival likes it,” said Doris Mae and picked up her tray.
Carter, his eyes round with delight, waited till she was safely up the stairs, then he said, “She goddamn Afroed it!” claiming ever after, to his own entire satisfaction, at the very least, that it was he, on that occasion, who coined the word for the use of decades to come.
* * *
—
“I must have scared you half to death,” said Ebony when Sarah and Victor brought their guest to say goodbye. “Me in a white blanket, pillow under my arm, like the headless ghost! I didn’t know that anyone was sleeping over.”
“I didn’t know I was sleeping in your bed! I am so sorry!” The agency lady made a moue and rolled her eyes.
“Not my bed,” said Ebony. “Not at all. I’m sorry I woke you. I keep haunting from one bed to the next, looking for the one that I can close an eye in.”
“Once,” said Annie with a look of bliss, “you slept in my mommy and daddy’s bed.”
“I did! I did! I did indeed.”
“I’m really sorry,” said Sarah, her forehead desperately furrowed. “I thought you knew that Mrs. Daniels was sleeping over, because dinner got so late.”
“Nope,” Ebony said. “I guess I didn’t know, did I!”
* * *
—
It was lunchtime before Doris Mae came downstairs. Ilka followed her out back to the clothesline. It occurred to Ilka that she never hung Carter’s shirts out.
Ilka said, “You slept late today?”
“When one of us has been away for the day,” said Doris Mae, “we just like to lie, and we talk.”
Ilka asked, “You tell each other what you did?” She meant, “What can anybody talk to you about?”
“Oh!” said Doris Mae and lifted up her head. The soft pallor of her skin absorbed light. It showed the creping at the throat and around the eyes. She looked older than Ilka had noticed before, and lovelier. “Oh!” Doris Mae said, and her frizzled shafts of hair, like so many spirals of the finest gauge of brass wire, caught the sun. They held the sun: “We just don’t ever get enough of talking.”
* * *
—
Sarah came to the dinner table flushed and feverish with hope. “She says not to give up! She’s willing to stick her neck out for what she thinks is right.”
“And what is that?” asked Ebony.
“You explain it,” Sarah said and hid her face, racked with emotion, against Victor’s arm.
“She says the agency processes two to three hundred babies…”
“A year,” said Sarah.
“Mrs. Daniels says a typical breakdown would be eighty-five percent nonwhite babies—that is to say Negro, Latino, a few Orientals—almost no Jewish babies!” Victor said to Ilka. “And fifteen percent others. Now you break down the families that want to adopt a baby…”
“Who are able,” Sarah said, “who can afford to adopt…”
“And you get less than thirty percent nonwhites. She says if they persist in the idiocy of ‘matching’ babies with adoptive families, you can ‘match’ thirty out of every hundred nonwhite babies with the thirty available nonwhite families, the fifteen available other babies with fifteen of the other families and there are fifty-five other families with no other babies to adopt and fifty-five non-other babies still sitting in institutions!”
“Did Mrs. Daniels say ‘fifty-five non-other babies’?” asked Carter, his eyes perfectly round.
“Yes, and that’s just one of goodness knows how many agencies around the country!”
“And that’s talking percentages!” said Sarah. Her tears rolled down her cheeks. “We’re talking about babies! Thousands—hundreds of thousands of little non-other babies!”
“Amazing!” said Carter.
* * *
—
When they lay in bed, Ilka asked Carter why he and Ebony and Percy kept laughing at Sarah and Victor’s wanting to adopt a Negro baby. “Why is this not a good thing they are doing?”
“Tell you a story,” said Carter. “White fellow visits with this poor old niggerman, says, ‘It’s a living shame, you living in this lean-to, wind blowing, snow coming in your chinks, while me and my family is all snug in our town house and I come out all the way here to tell you: I told my wife, “So long as that nigger is freezing his butt, don’t nobody light a fire in my house.” And I want you to know my wife, she’s walking with the chilblains on her feet, my baby got his nose frostbit, and my mother-in-law is like to die with the pneumonia.’ Old niggerman, he listening. Says, ‘Your wife walking with the chilblains, your baby got his nose frostbit, your mother-in-law like to die of the pneumonia, you don’t get no brownie points from me.’ What are brownie points?” Carter quizzed Ilka.
“I don’t know,” said Ilka, and Carter began to laugh. Ilka considered taking offense, but the jiggle of his belly felt so perfectly friendly that she lay and waited till he had finished laughing and then she said, “I don’t think Ebony is a hostile bitch. It’s that she can’t sleep.”
“Oh, I see,” said Carter.
* * *
—
“Who’s going to come swimming?” asked Ebony the next morning.
“We’re going swimming?”
“Yes,” said Ebony. “What’s going to happen to my hair doesn’t bear thinking of. Baby, are you coming?”
“I am going back to bed,” said Stanley.
“You’ll have to get your own lunch, then,” said Ebony, “because we are having ours at the White Fence Inn.”
“We are!” cried Ilka.
“I can get my own lunch!” said Stanley. “Why do you think I can’t get lunch?”
“Why indeed! Percival? Doris Mae?”
“I, if everybody will excuse me,” Percy said, “will borrow Stanley’s New York Times and go sit in the sun.”
“And I will sit beside you,” Carter said.
“Bunch of sissies,” Ebony said to Annie.
* * *
—
So it was only Ilka, Ebony, and the three Hamburgers who walked onto the plush little grassy beach, shaded and sun-flecked, with such fine, high arborage as Fragonard painted around his naughty courtiers to give them privacy. On a gray prominence, like the insulating back of a submerged elephant, a squirm of shivering, dripping little boys queued up for always one more splash into the clear brown water.
“Everybody has to turn around,” said Ebony. “Everybody, have a good old look.”
Ilka too had trouble keeping her gaze from Ebony’s astonishing breasts and hips and improbably narrow waist skinned over with what looked like elasticized metal. Ebony glimmered and blazed with leaping silver lights that made her legs, arms, shoulders and small, handsome head look the sheerest black.
A family of decorous picnickers, who had turned their heads toward the newcomers, turned back to their picnic.
“Take a good look and get it over with,” said Ebony.
But their party was destined to retain a high visibility. It was the size that makes decision difficult: one wanted shade, one wanted to tan, one wished to sit near the water, another wanted privacy. None wanted to impose, or to relinquish, a preference, until Victor sat down where he stood, on the only bald patch of ground that had no advantage of any kind. Annie wanted to go into the water and cried.
Ebony produced an outsize bottle of candy-pink shampoo out of a plastic shopping bag and took Annie’s hand. A sunbather
rolled onto his side and watched the voluptuous black-and-silver woman, sitting in the shallow edge of water, washing the hair of the skinny, sandy-haired child. Then the child washed the black woman’s hair and the water bore the film of soap downstream. The next boy in line drew up his knees, embraced air, and a voice in Ilka’s hair said, “Jews not permitted here.” She looked around. Victor’s smiling moon face eclipsed the world.
* * *
—
Annie was sleepy and wailed. The vertical sun had turned nasty. They collected their things and nothing more was said about any lunch at any inn. They piled silently into the car. Ebony wanted to get home and see Stanley getting his own lunch! “That is going to be something!”
* * *
—
When they walked into the kitchen Percival’s raised voice was saying, “What do you mean ‘Sammy Davis is not an artist’?”
Ebony said, “Uh-huh!”
“I mean,” replied Stanley, “that Sammy Davis Junior is a successful entertainer, loaded with talent. He is not an artist.”
“How about ‘artiste,’” offered Ebony.
“He is an entertainer,” said Stanley.
“That depends,” said Percival, “on your definition of ‘artist,’ doesn’t it?”
“No, it does not,” said Stanley, “depend on your, my or anybody’s definition, but on what does and what does not constitute art.”
“In your racist definition,” said Percival.
“How is it racist? I own one of the best private jazz collections in the goddamn country! Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker are artists. Sammy Davis Junior is an entertainer,” Stanley said to Percival’s back walking out the door. “Shit,” said Stanley.
* * *
—
It was mid-afternoon. Ilka stopped to hear a whisper—a faint aroma of music. She looked into the living room. The gentle flowered curtains had been drawn against the heat. Stanley beckoned. “Psst! Here. Listen.” A scratchy record turned on the hand-cranked gramophone. “Schumann. Fischer-Dieskau. Artists! Goddamn Germans!”