by Lewis Shiner
“No,” Ruth said.
“I FedEx them to a DNA lab tomorrow. Pay a premium for overnight service and get the results Wednesday. Guaranteed 99.999 percent accurate for inclusions.” He looked at Ruth. “Guaranteed 100 percent accurate for exclusions.”
Ruth began to cry. “How did this happen? How did all this happen?” She blew her nose into a tissue.
Robert did one swab, then the other, and handed them to Michael. “Go ahead, test them. Your mother isn’t going to cooperate, but this will tell you I’m your father. As should be obvious.”
Michael put the swabs into a clean plastic bag and sealed it. He took a second bag, turned it inside out, and grabbed the used tissue from Ruth’s lap with it.
“She’s not my mother,” Michael said. “They can prove it with this. Or with hair from her hairbrush back at the room. Or even from her toothbrush. It’s over. No more lies.”
His father’s bravado collapsed. Michael realized then that he’d been waiting all his life to see it. The coldness, the distance, the unreasoning anger were gone, and there was only a wounded and dying animal underneath. Michael felt the dizzying exaltation of total victory even as he recoiled in shame from the violence of it.
“Talk to me,” Michael said. “Please. I need you to talk to me.”
“Ruth,” Robert said, “go to the hotel. I’ll call you later.”
*
Robert had to tell her a second time, with a forcefulness Michael had rarely seen. She left in tears. Michael closed the door, drew the curtain between Robert and his roommate, turned off the TV and dragged the chair over next to the bed.
And so, finally, they began to talk. With interruptions for meds and dinner, they talked late into the night. They talked through the next day and the day after that, with Ruth exiled to the lounge down the hall. Michael asked questions, and showed his father photos from the books, and prompted him with the few facts he had. He made inferences about the things his father would never be able to put into words. And slowly, gradually, Michael began to see it in his own head: Hayti as it had been, Hayti as his father first saw it, Hayti in its raucous, swaggering prime.
ROBERT
1962-1970
Robert’s parents had taken him to Durham as a boy, and in his memory the Hayti neighborhood was as mysterious and frightening as the Caribbean island it was named for.
This would have been in the years just after World War II. During the war, a riot in Hayti had injured four people, damaged thousands of dollars’ worth of property, and required tear gas and machine guns to put down. Robert’s father had seen it as a sign of the Last Days.
Robert remembered the tobacco warehouses that dominated the center of Durham, and the singing that came from the basement of the American Tobacco Company plant, where black men cut the stems from the tobacco leaves in murderous heat for inadequate pay. He remembered his parents rolling up their windows, and ordering him to do the same, before they drove through Hayti. Robert had stared out at the sea of dark faces, wondering if they meant him harm, and why.
At that time the Cooper family lived at the far western edge of North Carolina, in Asheville, where Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson George had built his dream house, a 250-room mansion on 125,000 acres of rolling, forested land. Robert’s paternal grandparents were among the original servants at Biltmore House at the turn of the 20th century. Robert’s father became a groundskeeper after the estate opened to the public in 1930. Robert had grown up in the shadow of vast wealth, though his family was poor. That proximity had given his father a belief in a social order that was already dead on its feet, and left Robert conflicted and eager to escape.
Robert was drafted after high school, in the summer of 1956. He hadn’t bothered to apply to college, knowing there was no money for it, and was a few weeks into a construction job when the letter came. He served two years in Germany and then went to North Carolina State on the GI Bill to study Civil Engineering. The US was sprouting homes and skyscrapers and highways, and Robert wanted to be in the thick of it.
As a teenager he had looked at the towering façade of the Biltmore House and thought that there were things that man could make, and things only God could make, and that only God knew which was which. The Egyptians had used lime and gypsum to hold the pyramids together, and the Romans had built their aqueducts using slaked lime and volcanic ash, but for Robert’s money it was the invention of Portland cement in the early 19th century that had truly given man the godlike power to create stone. Concrete was infinitely malleable when wet, and changeless once it dried. Depending on the mixture, it could be light enough to float in water or heavy enough to hold back the Colorado River. It held Biltmore House together and paved the roads that led out of Asheville.
Concrete was the answer to most of the questions that Robert asked himself.
In April of 1962, toward the end of his senior year at State, Robert answered an ad in the Raleigh News and Observer and landed an entry-level job at Mason and Antree in Durham. It was an important firm, with architects and engineers downtown, and an affiliated company that had a construction, paving, and precast operation east of the city limits.
Until that time he’d set his sights on the North Carolina Department of Transportation, where the state’s highways were conceived, drawn up, and let out to contractors. But the Mason and Antree ad had specifically sought a highway engineer, and the salary was substantially higher than the state offered. So was the excitement level.
Durham was no longer the grimy boomtown he’d glimpsed in the forties. The tobacco companies had moved their headquarters to New York and many of the factories had gone to Richmond and points north. The textile mills had closed or flown overseas.
Now the city was picking itself up by the scruff of the neck and shaking itself awake. The hospital at Duke University had become world famous for its doctors and for its ability to secure grants. And people were talking about a revolutionary industrial development to be called Research Triangle Park. Believers said it would transform the region by bringing in the new computer and technology companies. If it happened, the Park would need roads and offices and factories as fast as people could design them and pour the concrete.
Robert’s fiancée began to talk about a June wedding as if he had already agreed to it. It was typical of their courtship. He had met Ruth Bynum at a dance at Meredith College, down the street from State in Raleigh. She was from rural Johnston County, with an accent that put him off a little, but she was a looker, no question. A lush figure set off by a narrow waist, honey-brown hair that turned up at the shoulders, wide green eyes. If her lips were a bit thin, it didn’t stop her from pouting and flirting with the best of them. And dancing. She could waltz, jitterbug, and foxtrot, and the memory of their slow dances made Robert sweat.
Robert had learned to dance at Biltmore parties, and she liked his lead. If she’d been more interested in him, or less, he would have felt only a passing attraction. As it was, she frustrated and befuddled him into something he confused with love.
In March she had taken him to meet her parents. Robert found Wilmer, her father, to be a strange mixture of ignorance and privilege. He lived, in his own small way, like the Vanderbilts. Though he did no work himself, the locals looked up to him as if he were a feudal lord. He rarely left the house, summoning the people and things he wanted to see. At the same time, his accent was so thick that Robert often had to mentally replay the man’s sentences to make sense of them, and his paternalistic and condescending attitude toward Negroes made Robert deeply uncomfortable.
As for Ruth’s mother, she seemed austere and not unkind, a hard woman honed thin by the years. Unlike other rich white families Robert had known, the Bynums had no servants, no cook, no maid. Ruth's mother prepared all the meals, and Ruth herself did the washing up. Ruth's mother seemed to like Robert well enough, and more than once he felt she’d wanted to tell him something, perhaps warn him away. It was not anything he was disposed to hear, and the words ne
ver came out.
They spent Sunday night in the ramshackle Bynum house, and some time after midnight Ruth came to him in the guest room—a room, she told him with some excitement, that used to be hers. It had taken Robert completely by surprise. He’d been convinced he would have to marry her, something he was far from sure he was ready for, before she would surrender to him.
It was not Robert’s first time. Ruth told him it was hers, though there was no blood. The sheer surprise of it, the need for silence and hurry, had been exciting and had left Robert wanting more, though other women he’d known had seemed to take more pleasure in the act itself.
In the days that followed she rebuffed all his attempts to make love to her again, while treating him with a new possessiveness that seemed to take marriage as a given. He found himself referring to her as his fiancée without ever having proposed.
The wedding, inevitably, was at the Bynum home. Wilmer paid for a honeymoon in Jamaica and there, far away from farm, friends, and family, he saw a side of Ruth that he’d begun to think he’d only imagined. She gave herself utterly to him. These were days of skin against bare skin, desire that conquered exhaustion, ocean sounds and salt breezes and sweat-soaked sheets. He was the happiest he’d ever been.
They came back from Jamaica to a two-bedroom bungalow on Woodrow Street, north and west of downtown Durham, two blocks from the city reservoir. Wilmer Bynum had provided the down payment, after he’d sent his own inspector to look the place over.
Robert’s parents rode the train in from Asheville on the Saturday before Robert started his new job. Ruth was at her most charming, and his parents loved the house and the quiet, tree-lined streets of the neighborhood. “We were in our forties,” Robert’s mother said, “before we were able to buy a place of our own.” Her jealousy, Robert saw, was aimed at Wilmer Bynum rather than himself.
“Our boy has married well,” was all his father said, beaming at Ruth. After the women retired, Robert and his father sat up late in the den.
“I’ve asked around a bit about this Bynum fellow,” his father said. He stood at the picture window, looking past the sycamore tree to the neatly trimmed lawn. “He’s no Vanderbilt or Rockefeller, but he does have a good deal of money and political influence. I don’t want to interfere or in any way compromise your happiness. I only say anything at all because our family has a long history of service to the rich, and I feel I should warn you to be careful.”
He turned to look at Robert. “The very rich tend to believe they own people in the same way they own steel mills and oil wells. It takes a certain coldness to amass a fortune and keep it. You have to see the feelings of others as being less important than your own.”
Robert took his time in answering. “I know what you’re saying. I don’t trust the man. He’s helped make things easier for Ruth and me, but I landed this job on my own. This is the start of great things for me. I’m going to make you very proud.”
“We’re already very proud. You’ll be serving the needs of thousands, maybe millions of people. We want to be sure that nothing will interfere with that.”
“Nothing will,” Robert promised. “You’ll see.”
*
The windows of the long room started at eye level and ran up to the twelve-foot ceiling. Gray metal fans hung down on long shafts and lazily stirred the morning sunlight. Three of the walls were old red brick and the fourth was yellow plaster, a shade darker than the linoleum tile floor. The room held five drafting tables in a rough circle around a sixth. Massive metal bases held springs and dampers that allowed the boards to rise, fall, and tilt with the touch of a lever. The boards themselves were covered in pale green vinyl, and their parallel bars sighed quietly as they moved, frictionless on their ball bearings, wires, and pulleys.
Draftsmen worked at four of the tables, and with a start Robert noticed that one of them was colored. He wore a striped short-sleeved shirt, red suspenders, and round, wire-frame glasses. His receding hair was cut short. Robert guessed him to be in his mid-thirties.
The center table bore a large, hand-lettered sign reading THE BOSS IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Used coffee cups and open materials handbooks lay on top of a barely touched 24 × 36 sheet of Albanene tracing paper.
The remaining table stood bare and unoccupied, the small wooden stand next to it empty save for a brush, a new art gum eraser with its sides still sharp, an adjustable triangle, a lead holder, a lead pointer, and an unopened box of leads.
Mine, Robert thought.
“This place used to be a textile mill,” Mitch Antree told him. Antree was Robert’s height, a lean and hyperactive hipster type. He had jet black hair, sideburns, and the hint of a ducktail at the back of his neck. Robert could smell the Wildroot Creme Oil on his hair. He wore a reddish-brown corduroy jacket over a yellow turtleneck.
“The company went under in the Depression, and the building sat empty for twenty years. Fred and I remodeled it for a client, then the client went out of business. So we worked out a deal and got the dry cleaners next door to take half the space, and here we are.”
Fred was Fred Mason, the architect half of the partnership, who worked out of his home in the pricey Forest Hills neighborhood. Robert had met him briefly at his second interview. Mason was in his sixties, a big man in advanced stages of decay. His hair was long and chaotic, reminding Robert of Beethoven, mostly white, with enough of its original red left to give it an odd, pinkish tone that matched the man’s moist eyes.
“Fred thought the place was unlucky and didn’t want to bid on it. People make their own luck, is my way of thinking.” The dry cleaners, which was foundering, might have been inclined to agree with Mason.
“There’s offices, rest room, coffee room, all that jazz, through that hallway. This is where the real action is. Step on up and meet the rest of the inmates.”
Two were apprentices, in their late teens. The one named Carl had severe acne and a full-blown DA haircut. The other, thin and bookish, was Ernest. A fat man named Charles squinted around a lit cigarette as he shook Robert’s hand, then turned back to the building section on his table.
“This is Maurice,” Antree said, one hand casually on the colored man’s shoulder. “Maurice Wilson. Meet Robert Cooper. Robert’s just got his degree from State.”
“Congratulations,” Maurice said. Robert, on guard for irony, wondered if he’d heard any. He put out his hand, careful to do it no differently than he had with the white men. Maurice pumped it twice with faint enthusiasm. Robert wanted to ask him some sort of personal question to humanize the moment. His mind was blank.
“You’ll be here in the office half the time,” Antree said. “The rest you’ll be in the field with the work crews.”
“Sure,” Robert said. “That’ll be great.” He cleared his throat. “I can do elevations, floor plans, any of the architectural drafting too. If you should happen to need it, I mean.”
“Charles and Maurice do the architectural work. I need a senior man on the engineering side. Engineers are not second-class citizens in this firm.” Robert nodded, wondering about Antree’s choice of words in front of the Negro. “Fred’s a good architect,” Antree went on, “but it’s the engineers that make those pipe dreams real. Don’t ever forget that.”
“No, sir,” Robert said. “I won’t.”
“Hey, man,” Antree said, “you don’t need any of that ‘sir’ jive around here. Call me Mitch.”
Robert nodded. He’d met a few people in college, beatnik types, who affected Negro slang. He’d never known how to react.
“All right,” Antree said. “Now, dig that we’ve got long-term plans for you, and they’re not going to happen overnight. You need to get experience with all the aspects of our business, including demolition, highways, apartment buildings, the whole deal. Taking those pieces of paper and making them into 3-D Technicolor structures. Think you can handle that?”
“Yess—yeah. Yeah, Mitch, I can handle that.”
“Cool. Because we’re about
to have more work in here than we can handle. You know anything about Research Triangle Park?”
“A little. Some people seem to think it’s a boondoggle.”
“They’re wrong, daddy-o. It’s the future. Pharmaceuticals. Medical equipment. Computers. Scientific instruments. Guys like Ernest over there, in long white lab coats.” Ernest, bent over his table, smiled without looking up. “They’re out there buying up land between here and the airport right now, as we speak. There is going to be some serious bread on the waters, and I’m going to get us a substantial piece of it. How does that sound to you?”
Enthusiasm on demand came hard for Robert. “It sounds great,” he said. The words fell flat despite their sincerity.
“Good deal, Lucille. Let’s get you some piece drawings to do so you can start earning your keep.”
*
At ten after 5, Robert got into his ’56 Mercury coupe, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and lit a Lucky. He was headed home. To avoid the worst of the American Tobacco traffic, he drove north of downtown, then cut across to Club Boulevard. The July heat was suffocating, and even with both front windows open, he couldn’t build up enough speed to get the thick, wet air moving.
He finished the cigarette and started a second before he got to Woodrow Street and pulled into his driveway. The day had turned overcast, intensifying the green of the leaves and hedges and lawns. Crepe myrtles in a hundred shades of pink and purple exploded in every yard. Between the overhanging oaks and the breeze from the reservoir, it felt at least ten degrees cooler than downtown. Robert sat and smoked for another minute or two, listening to the whir of a push-mower two doors east, the popping of sheets on a line.