“She’s been working at A&M for more than a minute,” Livingston says.
“But she’s got no degree.”
“Associate’s.”
“That’s not competitive.”
“Maybe not where you’re from,” Livingston says. “And Miss Cummings has a point that her fifteen years of working here makes up for that.”
“You must not think so,” Etienne says. “Or else you would have promoted her.”
Livingston chuckles as he stands at the window, looking out at the former military parade ground. The first colored officer hired by Montgomery A&M, he took the position as vice president of administration after leaving a job with an even bigger title at a colored college in Tuscaloosa. Sitting back down at the desk, Livingston slides a paper toward Etienne. Below the bold heading that says POST-DISASTER REPORT is the word CONFIDENTIAL. There is a check mark in the small box next to the entry UNRULY, DIFFICULT, OR TRAUMATIZED STAFF. Etienne reads the comments written on the line next to the box and feels the muscles in his neck tighten.
“I wasn’t unruly or difficult,” Etienne says. “Far from it.”
“You didn’t nearly get someone injured in the supply closet during the tornado?”
“No, I did not. Deedra has never been happy about me getting this job. Now I guess she’s got her own protest going.”
“Right or wrong,” Livingston says, “another report like this and you’ve got trouble.”
Livingston runs a hand down his yellow tie. His bearing reminds Etienne of the preacher he saw on the news a few nights ago, telling residents of Montgomery to keep up the boycott. Several times over the last few months he advised Livingston that Deedra be transferred. And yet what has this seasoned college administrator done about that? Nothing.
“She’s not happy with me either,” Livingston says. “I hear she’s talking trash about me for hiring you.”
“I’ll work on her,” Etienne says.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Livingston says as he slips the papers into a manila folder. “It wouldn’t look good if I have to step in and try to help her get with the program.”
In early January, during the first week Deedra is on vacation, Etienne visits the head of every department, talking at length about the assistance he wants to offer for Deedra’s career. While many managers and supervisors offer appreciative comments about Deedra, a few give friendly but muted criticism. All agree that as loyal as Deedra has been to the college, she deserves every opportunity to move up.
“You wanted to see me,” Deedra says on the afternoon of the day she returns from vacation.
It is a little after one, and she has come to the door of Etienne’s office, holding a restaurant take-out box. She wears a smart outfit and has a new haircut, bangs in front, low in back. Dressing for a job interview, Etienne wonders, getting up from his desk. Or still after my job?
“You’ve hit the salary roof in this department,” Etienne says, handing Deedra a job posting. “Thought you might want to see this.”
“This job is in facilities,” Deedra says.
“The pay is good.”
“I’d be working for Jim Stockard. Jim can’t keep anybody. Two people quit while I was on vacation.” Deedra takes her eyes off the page. “Is this why they hired you, to get me out of the department?”
Etienne follows Deedra out of the office and into the open work area. He is about to say something to her but then he hears the quiet. Not a single typewriter is clacking as Deedra walks out. He returns to his desk hoping she will return later, having reconsidered. But she doesn’t.
“I’ve already started looking for her replacement,” Etienne tells Livingston the next afternoon.
“How did you manage that?” Livingston asks.
“Jim Stockard is hurting for managers. He says he’d be willing to sweeten the deal to the point where Deedra would be a fool to turn the job down.”
“Do that and your budget might support the raise I said I’d look into when you came on board.”
Deedra Cummings leaves his department in early April, but the promised raise does not show up in Etienne’s paycheck until the end of June. With their baby, Warner, now walking, the one-bedroom apartment he and Jocelyn have been renting since they arrived in Montgomery is starting to feel small. One afternoon in July, they take a ride on his motorcycle out to Autauga County to see a house one of Jocelyn’s colleagues has been bugging them to come look at as a possible purchase.
“Why don’t you go down and take a look at the creek,” Jocelyn says, taking off her helmet as they pull to a stop in front of a two-bedroom house tucked among a group of mature pines. “I heard it’s not far. I’ll go inside to say hello.”
Etienne takes his time getting the bike’s kickstand into position. He told Jocelyn he did not want to look at houses this far outside the city. But after a short walk down the narrow, winding path, the view opens to him and he feels his head begin to clear. At the creek’s edge, he estimates that it is a mere forty meters to the far bank. But that short distance is no longer an easy race for him. He watches the slow-moving gray-green water and with each passing minute he feels grateful that the long winter that followed their arrival from Vermont is well behind them. No snow but plenty of other difficulties. Every few weeks Jocelyn wondered if they had made a mistake moving to Alabama. But now summer is here. He always considered himself a city boy, but maybe he can appreciate a house in the country.
The house belongs to an uncle of Jocelyn’s work colleague. Etienne returns from his walk to find Nathan Czerwinski, the colleague’s husband, inspecting a motorboat on its trailer still hitched to the rear of a double-cab truck in the driveway. Nearing fifty, Nathan is taller than Etienne. He wears nice slacks and dusty work boots.
“I am not surprised to hear that you’re ready to leave Montgomery,” Nathan says, raising the cover off the motorboat engine. “You couldn’t pay me to live there—especially now with the Nigras protesting and marching every other week. Christ, it’s worrisome.”
“Your daughter’s probably marching right there beside them,” Jocelyn says.
Nathan’s tanned face tightens. “They say good sense sometimes skips a generation.”
“How come you and your wife don’t buy the house?” Etienne asks.
“Excellent point,” Jocelyn says. “Your grandkids would love it out here.”
“The two-bedroom townhouse we got is enough to look after.” Nathan points his screwdriver at Etienne. “Do the two of you have any children?”
Etienne and Jocelyn exchange glances.
“We lost our first child,” Etienne says.
“We don’t talk about that much,” Jocelyn says. “And now we have a healthy baby boy. His name’s Warner.”
Nathan lifts the battery out of the housing. “Don’t know if my wife told you yet about our little request,” he says, digging crud out of the connectors with the screwdriver.
“No, she didn’t,” Jocelyn says.
“My uncle asked us to make sure that anyone with serious intent to buy the house is white and Christian. I feel like we have to honor what my uncle wanted.”
“Makes some sense, I guess,” Etienne says.
“Not to me,” Jocelyn says. “Seems a little unusual in this day and age. Why would you promise that?”
“Not that it’s any of our business,” Etienne says.
“It is our business if we’re buying the house,” Jocelyn says, looking at her husband.
“That’s not what I mean,” Etienne says. “I mean, we’d go crazy if we wanted to look into every little wish a seller has.”
“Just doing what our uncle asked,” Nathan says.
Nathan’s wife, Rose, a thin woman with dyed-blonde hair, comes outside with a trayful of beers.
“I suppose I understand the Christian part,” Jocelyn says, taking a beer off the tray and offering it to Nathan, “but how do you determine that somebody’s colored?”
“What do you mean?” Nat
han says.
“I mean what if one of us is colored?”
Nathan takes the beer from Jocelyn but seems reluctant to drink. He stares at Jocelyn’s hair a long while. “I see my wife still doesn’t know a helluva thing about picking friends,” he says, handing the beer back to Jocelyn.
Heading home with Jocelyn on the back and mindful of the motorcycle mishap he had the previous spring, Etienne works hard to keep his attention on the road. He disagrees with Jocelyn that Nathan thought she was joking about one of them being colored. While Nathan continued working on his boat, Rose handled the walk-through of the house. He joined them later on the back patio, but he had little to say as they chatted over drinks.
Etienne didn’t say much either.
If Jocelyn expects him to call Nathan later to say they are outraged over having to sign a covenant agreement, she is mistaken, Etienne thinks as he steers into the lot at their apartment complex. Any such remark will only cause Nathan, Rose, and the rest of their family to wonder why. He has lived in Alabama long enough to recognize that he is not ready to answer that question truthfully. That is the best strategy, since they plan to bring up their child here.
Dismounting the bike, Etienne wonders if Rose remembers the day she visited their apartment and put her arm next to his to show off her tan. When Rose asked if his mother’s skin was lighter or darker than his, Jocelyn had turned from chatting with another woman to listen to his answer. When they were first married, Jocelyn used to say things like that to Etienne all the time. That day she gave him a look that said, Why don’t you go ahead and say something about your mother? But he changed the subject.
“A realtor called the other day to say she has a perfect house,” Jocelyn says several weeks later. She and Etienne are in the bathroom, fighting for the best spot in front of the mirror as they get dressed for work. “Are you ready to look at another one?”
“That depends on the house,” Etienne says. “If it’s got a bigger bathroom, bring it on.”
The following Saturday afternoon, Jocelyn arrives home from a trip to the grocery store to find a brand-new motorcycle in their extra parking space.
“Didn’t we agree not to make any expensive purchases?” she asks Etienne in the living room, where he is feeding the baby. “We want to buy a house, remember?”
“We don’t need to buy one tomorrow. It can wait a while.”
Jocelyn does not bring up the matter at dinner, but for the next few days Etienne can tell she is not happy. The following week, on Wednesday evening when she comes home from her pottery class, he can tell something is coming.
“Three times this week I have asked you to park that thing farther away from the car,” Jocelyn says during dinner. “When are you going to move it?”
“I will,” Etienne says. “Stop bitching about it.”
Jocelyn finds plenty of other matters to complain about as the evening progresses. The next day, in her cubicle at the bursar’s office, she finds herself cursing about the new motorcycle every few hours. This stealth purchase has made her recall how her mother avoided handling money. For twenty years her mother worked as a retail sales clerk, and for twenty years she turned her paycheck over to her husband. Jocelyn would watch her father sign her mother’s name to the back of the check and then take it to the bank. “Look,” Jocelyn said to her mother on a visit home from college, holding one of the deposited checks returned with the bank statement. “These days he just signs his own name.”
In the staff lounge at a quarter of five, Jocelyn runs a soapy sponge over her coffee mug, realizing that she has no idea how much money Etienne took out of their joint account to pay for the motorcycle. She now resents the fact that he talked her into accepting the college’s offer of the apartment just off the highway. She wanted an apartment in a nicer neighborhood.
“What are these?” Etienne asks several weeks later in the living room, when he finds a stack of bank forms placed on the sofa cushions.
“Application for a new joint account,” Jocelyn says.
“We’ve already got a joint account.”
“This one’s different. The bank won’t honor a withdrawal on this unless we both sign.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“For keeping track of our money, two heads are better than one.”
Jocelyn gathers up the forms and presents them to Etienne. When he does not take them, she drops the forms into his lap.
“I’ll sell the motorcycle, if you want,” Etienne says.
“Go ahead and sell it, then.”
Etienne does not sell the motorcycle. But on a hot September morning, with Jocelyn reluctantly aboard, he takes a drive out to a small town fifty minutes east of Montgomery. The small three-bedroom house sits near a paved road, but back a ways. The large backyard is lined with towering elms and oaks.
“It’s for rent,” Etienne says. “But the realtor says it might come up for sale.”
“I suppose a house like this will do,” Jocelyn says with barely a smile. “I wouldn’t object to our renting it.”
Out in front, Jocelyn studies the house a long time before getting back onto the motorcycle. The next evening when they are at a steak house with a couple they have become friendly with, she mentions several times how easy the commute to work would be from the house. In October, Jocelyn sends out change-of-address postcards filled with gushing sentences about the family’s new house.
Quick, tell me,” Jocelyn says to Etienne in early December. “How many months are there in a decade and a half?”
Etienne carries two bowls of ice cream into the living room of the house they have begun renting in Woodhaven, Alabama. “That easy,” Etienne says sitting down on the sofa next to her.
“One hundred and eighty, right?” Jocelyn says. She holds a copy of the most recent edition of the University Administrator magazine. “Half the high school students who will be graduating in the class of 1963 who took this nationwide test got that question wrong.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Etienne says. “Maybe it’s because the question was worded funny.”
“How do you mean funny?”
“Well, in a way the kids didn’t understand.”
“Oh, peacock,” Jocelyn says. “The question was worded exactly like I said.”
“Do you have an explanation?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe bad parents.”
“What about bad teachers?”
“Perhaps,” Jocelyn says. “But I always figure most kids learn to count at home. I did.”
Jocelyn takes her bowl of ice cream and resumes reading the article. A little while later, when Etienne turns on the television she sets aside the magazine. “Where did you put the letter you were reading earlier?” she asks.
“Over there.” Etienne points to the top of the television.
“My French was never that good,” Jocelyn says. “What does it say?”
“My grandmother Claire is having a birthday in a few months,” Etienne says.
“How old will she be?”
Etienne laughs. “Grandmother has never told anybody her age. The party is in April.”
“That’s right around the corner. I assume you do not plan to attend?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, that response is a surprise.”
“You shouldn’t be surprised,” Etienne says. “I’ve told you how much I loved my grandmother when I was growing up.”
The envelope contains a picture of Claire. Etienne holds it the following evening when he dials his grandparents in Montreal. He has trouble understanding his grandmother, and at first he thinks his French is rusty. But then he realizes Claire’s speech is slurred.
“Just a mild stroke,” Jean-Yves says when he comes back on the line. “She’s recovering well. She will pick up super-duper when you come see her.”
The next evening Jocelyn enters the kitchen to find Etienne about to cut up a new credit card that has been sent to her, unrequested. “Don’t you dare,” she
says. “I’ve already charged something on the card.”
“What?”
“Two airline tickets to Montreal. You do want to go to your grandmother’s birthday party, don’t you? And guess what? We can take the baby for free.”
Etienne hands over the card without comment. But later he lies in bed annoyed at Jocelyn for purchasing the tickets without consulting him. He turns over in bed, recalling how young Claire looked when she sat for the picture that came with the letter. He tries to recall her voice as it sounded that year, or the year she bought him his first grown-up bicycle, or during the weeks he spent with her and Jean-Yves in the mountains the summer before he graduated college. But this evening, no pleasant memory can replace the memory of how weak and raspy her voice sounded the previous evening on the telephone.
In a bad dream he had a few days after moving to Alabama, he saw his grandmother Claire telling his father that he ought to marry again. In another dream Claire was asking Timothee if he had heard from her grandson. “I’m afraid our young one has disappeared into the wilds of America,” Claire said. “Will we ever see him again?”
Can it be that his last visit to Montreal was for an uncle’s funeral? he wonders as he tries to will himself to sleep. On that trip he arrived in the morning and flew out in the evening. But he will not chastise himself too harshly for not visiting his grandparents more often, he concludes, pulling the covers up to his neck. He comprehended enough of Claire’s words on the telephone to have understood her to say that she recognized he has a new life down in Alabama, a life he must dedicate to his family.
On New Year’s Eve, Etienne makes a resolution for 1963 to spend more time with his wife and son. On a warm Saturday at the beginning of spring, he loads his motorcycle onto the bed of a borrowed truck and takes the family on a day-trip out to a lake in Elmore County. While Jocelyn and the baby nap on a picnic blanket, he mounts his motorcycle for the three-mile loop around the lake.
To his surprise, navigating the rough patches on the gravel road is not fun today. The vibrations on these rough stretches of road produce uncomfortable jerks to his body. He has been riding for less than ten minutes but already he feels a headache coming. Gripping the handlebars, he races along the dusty road at speeds far lower than when he used to race down Mount Royal on his bicycle. The motorcycle Claire encouraged Timothee to buy won Etienne new friends. He liked that some of them used to drive down to visit him when he was at college in New Hampshire. A better grandson would have thanked his grandmother more often over the years. And when over the years has Etienne ever bothered to write to his grandfather?
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