“Joani, Joani, baby, I didn’t mean that. I swear I didn’t! I was off in space—” I plead, and I crouch down to hold her in my arms, but she’s thrashing away.
“Where’s my grandma? I want my sister! I want Brenda—and Ma!” she’s screaming. By now, we’re surrounded by about three frumpy matron types—the types who were smiling all over us a few minutes ago with those Isn’t-she-cute? looks—and they’re all asking “Is she okay? Should we call an ambulance?” No, I say, trying to be polite and cavalier, she doesn’t need an ambulance, she’s just tired and stressed, big sewing project, it means a lot to her, and we’ll be fine. And then I whisper to her, “C’mon, baby, don’t make a scene,” and I realize with a kind of terror that that’s exactly what my father would say in the same situation: Don’t make a scene.
“Why’d you get mad at me? When’s Grandma coming back, huh? I want her to come with me,” Joani says, still crying and snorting.
“She’s coming back pretty soon,” I say, holding her again, and this time, thankfully, she doesn’t shove me away. “You can go with her next time, okay? I’m real sorry what I just said. It’s like, I wasn’t even talking to you. It’s more like I was talking to myself, get it?” We’re both sitting on the floor now of this huge store, surrounded by odd-smelling columns of poly-blend fabric in spring colors, with a piped-in Muzak version of “I Say a Little Prayer” in the background, and I’m thinking, miserable, What the fuck is going on everywhere?
She sniffles, looks down at her notebook, then asks reasonably: “Brenda should be coming back pretty soon, too, huh?”
“Pretty soon, I guess,” I say, fiddling absently with the zipper on her parka. “Maybe in a month or two.”
“Is Grandma gonna die this time?” she asks without pause.
“I don’t think right away. Eventually, yeah. We all are. But not right away. Grandma’s very tough, you know.”
She stares at me dully, half a finger in her nose. She’s on to me, I’m thinking, way in the back of my head, and I’ve got to have her on my side, if it ever all comes down.
“Joani?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You still love me, right?”
She looks alarmed. “Uh-huh,” she says, nodding her head vigorously.
“I mean—you don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?”
“No. You’re very, very good. I just wish you didn’t yell at me now.”
“I’m sorry for that, okay? Now, look: let’s finish up here—let’s pick a really, really pretty color and a print, something that’s gonna make you look really pretty—and then we’ll go to Micky D’s for lunch, okay? We’ll get the apple pies for dessert, okay?”
“That’s what you said you’d do anyway,” she says, faintly exasperated.
“Right,” I say, stymied. “That’s what I said. And that’s what we’ll do. So let’s get everything you need and go to lunch, okay?”
“O-kay,” she says, flat, and she turns away and runs her chubby white hand down a bolt of yellow easy-care sailcloth, then frowns and checks it against her notebook.
* * *
They’ve put out most of the fires in Leicester but patrol cars are still running around arresting gangs of kids, the news reports that night as I’m getting ready to leave for the Unitarian church. My father tells me to be careful on the roads, and to park behind the church if I can rather than in front. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” I say, heading out the door, picking my way around Joani, who’s tracing out a pattern on the family room floor.
“Someone called for you, asking where you were tonight,” he calls after me.
“Who?” I call back, my hand on the screen door.
“I dunno. I think it was Charlie. I told him you were gonna be at the big meeting.”
“Is Charlie going to the meeting?” I call again, momentarily stayed. “That doesn’t sound like him.”
“He didn’t say. He just said thanks a lot, and hung up.”
“Oh.” I stand there in the doorway for a moment. “Well, okay. See you later tonight.”
“See ya,” he calls back.
When I pull up to the lighted church, there are so many cars parked in front and back—the plain-model American cars of the people like us who live downtown and the navy and steel-gray Volvos of the richer people who live outcountry—that I have to turn the hatchback around and find a place farther down the street. “Lock your doors,” an old man says to me when I get out of the car and trudge behind him into the lobby of the church. The look on his face—tense, incensed, afraid, guilty, stubborn—is the look on the faces of most of the people jamming the lobby of the church when I walk in, and I can hear them comparing accounts of what they’ve seen on the news or heard on the radio all day, in low voices, as if they’re stunned, as if they can’t believe this is happening virtually in their town, like this is only supposed to happen in Roxbury or Dorchester or other bad parts of Boston. It seemed like everyone’s here, not just the horsey liberal Unitarians but all the Catholic Leicester exiles like my own parents (who aren’t here, obviously, but they wouldn’t be here, anyway; they hate this kind of thing and they never go to Town Meeting). Everyone’s standing around in little knots, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, with occasionally a jarring laugh or a qualified smile, and it’s funny to see these two different groups of people together here (because they never would otherwise) in this plain-looking, Puritan-like church completely bereft of the stained-glass windows and mournful statues of the stucco St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic on Main Street, to which my own family defected after they left Leicester and Gothic old St. Agnes’s behind.
Most of the people here are adults, but I recognize a few kids my age from school. Some of them have even refastened their stupid Kerrie Lanouette memorial buttons back onto their coats, and I want to tell them that Kerrie Lanouette is last year’s news, and this is a whole new chapter. There’s Phoebe’s mother, Judy Shapiro-Signorelli, bustling about with her clipboard, nodding gravely and saying over and over again, “Did I give you a copy of the agenda?” There are a whole bunch of old ladies here and some of them have even gone so far as to bring their rosaries and walk around clutching them like desperate lucky charms. I see Mr. McGregor, my principal, and Charlie’s parents in their matching plaid car coats, and my old piano teacher, Mrs. Hartong, who must be pushing a hundred now, and Goody Farnham, her bun no looser for a Sunday night in crisis, and everyone looks dazed and sallow, congregated here under the harsh fluorescent lights of the church lobby, because no one has ever congregated in a church before in the middle of a riot, as far as I know. Suddenly, I catch weird Mrs. Bradstreet standing listlessly next to her husband, craggy, muddy, rich old Nathan, the town selectman. When she sees me, her mouth drops open and she looks as though she’s about to come over to me, but I smile thinly and duck off down the stairs in search of Phoebe before she can catch me.
In the basement, where someone’s set out coffee and apple juice and whole-wheat doughnuts (How very Unitarian, I think, in spite of myself), Phoebe is over in the corner with the members of godjangle, three bearded guys in their thirties who own a landscaping business in Boxford, and they’re rehearsing some ridiculous peace-and-harmony song, but Phoebe stops her relentless alto when she sees me and rushes over.
“I’m so glad you came,” she says, hugging me, smelling overwhelmingly of patchouli, like if she wears enough, she’ll immunize herself from the coming revolution that she’s predicted. “Isn’t this amazing? Can you believe my mother organized all these people?”
“I didn’t see any Hispanic types upstairs,” I say.
“Well, that’s what tonight is about.” She shrugs. “To brainstorm ways to get over the communications barrier so we can stop all this crazy shit from happening again.” She grabs a doughnut from the refreshments table and breaks it in two, offering me half.
“Why don’t we learn Spanish and they learn English?” I say, beginning to grow uncomfortable with the entire thing. (For some reason, I can o
nly think about what Brooks would think of all this, and I have a suspicion he’d call it pretty pathetic.) “Don’t you think that would be a good place to start?”
“Oh, that’s not too reductive, Eric.” She scowls back at me.
“Well, it’s true!” I say, getting more upset than I thought I would. “I mean, Feeb, your mother’s great for doing this, but nobody in West Mendhem even knows any Hispanic people in Leicester. They don’t even see them, except for maybe the checkout girls at the supermarket at West Mendhem Plaza, and nobody even goes there anymore, they’re so fucking scared. So how are we all supposed to get together and talk? The people in West Mendhem don’t even want them coming in to town, and nobody’s going over there, that’s for sure. Should they do it via satellite or something?”
Phoebe just rolls her eyes and says, “Think globally, act locally.”
“Feeb!” I laugh. “What the hell does that have to do with anything? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do up there tonight.”
“Didn’t my mother give you a copy of the agenda?”
“Not yet.”
“She will. You’re just supposed to sit up there with me and be the youth and speak up when the spirit moves you. Try to say something constructive.”
“Oh,” I answer. I don’t know what else to say.
“You want to hear this Corso poem I’m gonna read while godjangle plays?” she asks, pulling a piece of paper out of the pocket of her overalls. I shrug “Sure,” but then I say, “Just let me go to the bathroom first, okay?” and I split, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but more to decide whether I want to make a quick getaway. I’m halfway up the stairs when I nearly crash into Mrs. Bradstreet, who sort of looks like an earthy-crunchy mummy, still completely encased in her Nepalese-looking wrap coat and black knit cap.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick,” she says, standing above me on the half-lit stairs.
“Hi, Mrs. Bradstreet,” I say, trying to maneuver my way past. “I’m just rushing to the bathroom before things start.”
“Can I talk to you for a second first?” Her voice is measured, as usual, but eerily insistent, and in the dimness of the stairwell, her expression seems devoid of clues.
“Um. Sure,” I say, not knowing what else to say, and she leads me into the minister’s cluttered office at the top of the stairs, where she closes the door behind us. Outside, I can hear the steady drone of residents waiting for the meeting to come to order, and the feeling of being in here with her, quarantined from them, gives me a chill.
“Is this about my Yale rec?” I ask, hating her silence. “Because if you’re busy, I can give it to Goody—Mrs. Farnham. If you’re busy.”
“No, Eric,” she says, giving me the weirdest smile, almost like she’s sorry for me or something. “I’ve already written you a glowing dissection and put it in the mail. I took quite a lot of time with it.” She shocks me by pulling out a pack of cigarettes, lighting one, dragging on it, and setting it down in the brimming ashtray on the minister’s desk.
“Would you like a cigarette?” she asks me, handing me the pack.
“No thanks. I don’t smoke.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, with that same terrifying half-smile on her face. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“I’m sure, thanks,” I say. She just goes on smiling, her head cocked as usual to one side, and fiddling with the cigarette.
“Mrs. Bradstreet, have I done something wrong?”
She laughs again, still smiling. “No, Eric, you haven’t done anything wrong. This is a Unitarian church, you know. You’re not defined here by your transgressions.”
“I know,” I say feebly, but inside I’m screaming to get out.
“I just wanted to remind you,” she says.
“Thanks.”
She blows a huge mouthful of smoke up to the ceiling, then stubs out the cigarette, hardly touched. Outside, I can hear Phoebe’s mother’s voice over the PA system, a general hush, then the shuffle and scrape of people taking their seats in the boxed pews.
“They’re starting outside,” I say, inching back toward the door.
“Eric. Eric.”
“Uh-huh?” My hand is grazing the doorknob. All I want to do is slip out of the church and back into the car and drive home as fast as I can and mind my own business for the rest of my life.
“I saw you in Boston yesterday.”
What I feel is a sick thud of inevitability, like I saw that line coming the second she laid eyes on me tonight—no, not then, the minute she laid eyes on me that first day in class, like she saw me, not in Boston, but just generally saw me, from the very start. I’m shaking, I can feel sweat beginning to creep down my back and under my arms, right under my shirt and sweater, and my first instinct is to excuse myself and run, but I don’t. I can’t, now. I’ve got to get through this.
“You did?” I ask, trying to tame my voice. “Where?”
“Downtown.”
“Oh, yeah?” I manage a smile, and she returns it. “You go in a lot?”
“I do.”
“To the museum?”
“To the museum, and other places. The bookstores. Galleries. I have friends there, too, from younger days. But mostly just to get away—”
“Completely,” I say, faking a bond.
“And to think.”
“Me, too,” I say, emphatically, thinking that maybe she only spotted me, fled to Boston, just like here, just to get away for a day, just to sort things out.
“Who’s your friend?” she asks, meticulously casual.
“Huh?”
“Your friend. Whom I saw you with. The young African-American man.”
“Oh!” I nearly shout. I’m a mess, but I don’t know how to calm down. My stomach is doing backflips, screaming again and again What did she see? Where? In front of the Christian Science building? Please, please God, not there. “You saw him, huh?”
“I did.”
“Oh,” I say. “He’s just—a friend, that’s all,” then, in what strikes me as a brilliant afterthought, “An old family friend.”
“I see,” she says, and the half-smile is back.
“Anyway,” I say, hand on knob again. “Maybe we should get out there, huh?”
“Oh, Eric, come off it,” she says, so full of impatience that I slam back shut the door I’ve half-opened. Then I just stare at her, trapped, and she pulls off her knit cap.
“What is it?” I ask, point-blank, too frayed to play it cool anymore. “What’d you wanna ask me?”
“Eric,” she says, sighing, smiling, sitting down. Then, in a very bored, very just-the-two-of-us voice, she says, “Now, Eric, what is this tomfoolery of a meeting about tonight, anyway?”
“It’s about the riot,” I say. “And what to do about it.”
“And what do you think the gentlefolk of West Mendhem are going to do about it?”
I don’t say anything for a minute. I can hear them out there, Phoebe’s mother’s voice, shrill and earnest, over the microphone, then a loud uprising of applause, a scattering of hollers. In the minister’s office, just above our heads, there’s the buzz of the fluorescent lights. “Nothing,” I say.
Mrs. Bradstreet nods, slowly, about eight times. Then she says, “Now, Eric, this meeting has been called because the people in this town don’t know what they can do to get along better with people whose skin color is different from their own. Am I correct?” She’s talking to me now very slowly, very pedantically, the way my cousin Bethie Lynn talks to Joani.
“I guess so. Sort of.” I want to say that it’s more complicated than that, that it’s about crime and safety and so on, but more than that, I just want to leave, get home, so I decide to go along.
“Now, Eric. When I was just a few years older than you, many, many eons ago…” She pauses, waiting for me to laugh, or protest, so I smile dimly. “When I was just a few years older than you, I boarded a bus in Boston filled with many other people, some whose skin color was the same as my own,
some whose pigmentation was—not the same. And we took that bus down to Mississippi, because, at that time in our lives, at that moment in the history of this country, we thought our single most pressing duty was to find a way to better the relations between people of divergent flesh tones. Okay?”
I nod obediently. She’s crazy, I’m thinking.
“And do you know what happened?”
“The Civil Rights Act,” I say.
The loony smile again. “The Civil Rights Act, yes. Praise be to God. Free at last, free at last. And do you know what happened to me on that trip?”
“No,” I say, fervently not wanting to know.
“I met a young man, a lawyer, the color of whose skin was not my own. And then I fell in love with that man. And then, after I had made up my mind to stay in Mississippi and make a life with that man, I found out I was going to bear his child.”
She’s speaking so slowly, so calmly now, looking at me so intensely, it’s almost as though she expects me to whip out a notebook and take notes. I swallow. I don’t know what to say.
She lights another cigarette. “And do you know what I proceeded to do then?”
I swallow again. “No.”
“I was so … startled”—and there’s a catch in her voice, but she seems to recover, and go on—“at the thought—not the thought, but the reality—of having that child, that I took the necessary steps. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, Eric, do you know something?”
“What?”
“That act—and the consequent act of leaving him and coming back north and getting on with what is conventionally described as the rest of one’s life—I have come to regret more than any other decision I’ve ever made. And that includes marrying Nathan Bradstreet, to answer a question I’m sure you and many others have always wanted to ask.”
I want to tell her that I never wanted to ask, but I don’t. “I’m sorry” is all I say.
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