Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  Moreover, Olivia, though not a “comfortable” housekeeper, was a clean and a considerate one. She really never interfered with his “papers”; she never, even from the beginning, troubled him with the delinquencies of the help. And in those days, and for some years to come, she never exceeded the budget which he allowed her. Also her obvious willingness, even eagerness, to have children pleased and touched him. In his total ignorance of the plans which nestled eternally in the back of her sleek, dark head, he reasoned that a woman so fond of children must by a very natural extension develop eventually a certain tenderness for their father. So he hoped for many things and forgave her much with a somewhat rueful and yet amused indulgence.

  Until he found in her the unalterable determination to carry himself and his children definitely across the narrow border-line of race! This too he at first regarded with some indulgence, but her unimaginative persistence finally irritated him. He was too busy to undertake completely the education of the children—he was responsible for their maintenance. But he could let them see his manifest respect and liking for many men who had been his boyhood friends and who bore the badge of their mixed blood plainly upon them.

  He told the children every story he knew about the heroes of the race. Olivia would have preferred them to be ignorant of their own remote connection with slavery. But he did strive to make them realize the contrast between their present status and that of their black forebears. He emphasized the racial progress, stressing the brief span of years in which it had been accomplished.

  And the children, straightforward, serious little things without an ounce of perversity in their make-up, were entranced, thrilled. Perhaps because they never met with any open expression of prejudice they seemed to find their greatest interest and amusement among the children of their father’s friends who most definitely showed color. For a brief while Christopher’s hero was Crispus Attucks; Teresa’s brave Sojourner Truth. But later, through lack of nourishment, their interest in this phase of history died.

  When the children were four and a half, and six, respectively, Olivia found she was going to have another baby. She was really very happy about it with a naiveté and a frankness which, Dr. Cary, as before, found inexpressibly moving and charming. Within herself she was making plans. This child should be her very own. She would make her husband believe that she needed a change, she would take the child away and live with him apart for two, three, perhaps for five years. In appearance, in rearing, in beliefs he should be completely, unrelievedly a member of the dominant race. She was a much wiser woman than she had been six years ago. The prospect made her gay and charming, almost girlish; far younger too than her twenty-eight years, younger indeed it seemed to her husband than she had ever been in those remote, so precious years of training.

  “This one will be a boy,” she told big Christopher gaily. “He’ll be the handsomest and most attractive of us all. And I’ll name him after myself. An Oliver for your Christopher.”

  Her prophecy was, except in one respect, absolutely true. She had boasted of the ease with which her children had entered the world. But this one she was confident would outstrip them all.

  “I’m sure I’ll be up very soon, Chris,” she told her husband. She adopted one of her rare moods of coquetry. “And when I do get up, you ought to reward a dutiful wife. How would you like to send her and your baby son on a little trip to England?” Her eyes were bright with secrecy. He would, he assured her, do anything, give her anything she wanted within his range.

  But the unforeseen happened. The baby arrived in due course. “Hale and hearty,” said his beaming father. There never was a baby haler and heartier. But Olivia did not fare so well. She had one sinking spell after another. For the first time she was unable to nurse her child. She was to meet with no excitement or shock and as the baby was doing very well it was best for her not to be concerned with him for a while. She was to concentrate on recovering her strength. So that it was a full month before the baby was set before her, crowing and laughing and persistently and futilely striking his little hands together.

  Olivia sat up, arms outstretched to receive him. Her baby! Her eyes stretched wide to behold every fraction of his tiny person. But the expectant smile faded as completely as though an unseen hand had wiped it off. She turned to her husband sharply:

  “That’s not my baby!”

  But it was her baby. It was a boy, handsomer and more attractive than the other children. He was named Oliver. . . . They had been calling him that for a month, her delighted children assured her . . . his hair was black and soft and curly . . . and he had the exact bronze gold complexion of Lee Blanchard!

  She had reckoned without her own father!

  For the first time since she had known the futile anger of her early childhood she slipped into a black, though silent, rage. Her early anger had been directed against her father. This later ebullition included both her husband and her helpless little boy. She had no special beliefs about prenatal influences but she did observe to herself in the dark and tortuous recesses of her mind that if big Christopher had not been so decidedly a Negrophile, the appearance of their child would have been otherwise.

  The little fellow was of a remarkable beauty. Through one pretext and another Olivia contrived not to be seen on the street with him. But the two older children and his father would proudly conduct him anywhere. And wherever he went he attracted attention . . . infinitely more so than his brother and sister had ever earned. Added to this was an undeniable charm of manner and of mind. He possessed not only a winning smile and a genuine sweetness of attitude and conduct but he was unquestionably of remarkable mental endowment . . . If he had possessed an ounce of self-confidence, or even of the ordinary childish conceit which so often marks the “bright boy,” he might easily have become unbearable. But even from babyhood little Oliver sensed in himself one lack which early automatically destroyed any root of undue self-esteem. He knew he did not have his mother’s love. . . . Worse than that through some strange childish, unfailing perception he was sure of her active but hidden dislike for him.

  When he was home Olivia fed him with the same food, watched over and satisfied his physical welfare as completely and meticulously as she watched over that of the other members of her household. But she never sought his company, she never took him riding or walking as she did the others, never bestowed on him more than the perfunctory kiss of salutation. . . . When people, struck with his appearance and healthy grace, praised him before his face as so often they did, he would turn sometimes toward her thinking dimly that now she must be proud of this fine little boy who was her son. But he never surprised on her countenance a single flash of delight or pride or love.

  It saddened his childish days . . . As soon as he became old enough to be from under her surveillance Olivia saw to it that he spent most of his time with her own mother in Boston or with her husband’s mother in South Philadelphia. In both of these homes he met with the intense affection and generous esteem which his finely keyed little nature so craved. Gradually he became able to adjust himself to the inexplicable phenomenon of a mother who not only did not love with especial signal fondness, but who did not love at all, her youngest son. By sheer strength of will he forced himself to steel his brave and loyal heart against this defection and to crush down his pain.

  His father had some sense of what was happening and in his heart he bore his wife a deep and unyielding dislike.

  CHAPTER II

  TERESA loved the atmosphere of Marise’s house. It was not at all like her own. Olivia saw to it that the walls were freshly “done over” every year. Sometimes a cherished piece of furniture which just suited the curves of your thin growing body would suddenly disappear to be replaced by another intensely new and different and uncomfortable. But in Marise’s house the decorations were rather dark and worn and indistinguishable; nobody cared if occasionally a small soiled finger traced over a scroll or a twisted design on wall or table cover. The furniture too w
as old and restful. And in the large old-fashioned sitting-room in the second story back you could make as much noise, laughing, singing, romping as you pleased.

  Years afterward when all the details of her childhood, despite its unsatisfactory character, seemed to merge into a delectable vision, Teresa always saved the memory of her sparse visits to Marise as the acme of the few enjoyments which life had offered. Once in later, listless days she read a line from a poem by Claude MacKay:

  “We were so happy, happy, I remember—”

  It seemed so wonderful that she had ever been truly happy. She especially recalled how on the few hectic (as it seemed to her) afternoons that she had spent at her friend’s house, Marise’s mother, Mrs. Davies, had come and stood for a few moments in the doorway surveying them all with her wide, jolly smile.

  “Have a good time, children,” she would intone. “I want you all to be happy.” Marise and Phebe Grant and Nicholas Campbell and any other children who would be there used to look up and smile with the careless gratitude of familiarity. But Teresa would cross over to the billowy dark woman, standing in the doorway exhaling such a sense of comfort with her benisons, and slip her little hand into hers.

  It seemed so wonderful to the child that Marise’s mother instead of talking of Ambition, or Standing or Racial Superiority should mention only Happiness.

  There were the two weeks when her mother went to Chicago to attend a Convention of Welfare Workers. . . . Teresa found herself at the Davies’ home almost every afternoon. . . . There were so many things to talk about; so much to discuss with these girls from whom she felt she would one day be ruthlessly separated. Already, though so far off, she could begin to descry Fate walling her in . . . away, apart.

  Today Marise was to read them her story. She had been working on it for a month. They had not even known the title. Marise triumphantly pronounced it aloud: “I Was A Moonshiner’s Wife.” Even Phebe, knowing Marise as well as she did, was impressed. Teresa for her part was completely overwhelmed. How could a girl of thirteen know all these things! The story teemed with bloodshed, terrible threats, gallons of whiskey, strong men, glamorous women, unbridled passion, sharpshooting and the moon!

  Toward the end Nicholas Campbell lounged in and laughed loud and long at some of the context.

  “ ‘ “Leave me alone,” he hissed.’ Go on. Marise, you can’t say a thing like that!”

  “What’s the reason I can’t?”

  “Because there’s nothing in that sentence to hiss with. . . . And then that’s not the way men talk, not moonshiners anyway. A lot you know about moonshiners. You were a moonshiner’s wife! You’d run a mile to get away from one!”

  “She’s using her imagination,” Teresa interposed, a trifle timidly. She rarely spoke to young Campbell, a slender, swarthy youth with hair that curled and waved itself into peaks, so that his head looked sculptured. His skin although dark had a reddish tinge; so thin it was, one seemed always to glimpse the hot blood coursing beneath. Such a boy, Teresa thought, when she pondered on him at all, could probably upset a girl’s mind very much. But resolutely she kept her thoughts away from him. Let him be destined for whom he might. He and his kind, she knew, were not for her.

  “Nicky’s right,” said Phebe, suddenly, stoutly. “Of course a girl, especially a girl like us, wouldn’t know anything about a moonshiner. But, come on, Marise, read us the rest of the story. Let’s see what happens to you. Did you shoot your wicked husband, or did you remain his humble slave?”

  But Marise knew, none better, when her great moment had passed. “I’m tired of reading,” she yawned. “Let’s play theatre.”

  She found costumes for them: for Nicholas, a little red velvet jacket, for Phebe, trailing white silk with a veil; and red silk again for herself. Teresa accepted only a faded garland of flowers; she would be audience, she said. No one demurred; it was at times like this her favorite rôle.

  Nicholas sang in a breathy, boyish soprano that would soon now be changing.

  Marise played and sang and danced; her voice even at that age was thrilling. Already she possessed charm, assurance, savoir faire. She was going to be an actress when she grew up, she always declared. Her dancing was beginning to show something of a professional quality, there was more to it than the spontaneous abandon of a child at play. Even with this unexacting audience it was plain that she was doing her best; Marise would never be second in any line. She would either excel or withdraw.

  Usually Nick’s eyes, at times like these, were fastened upon her. And indeed it was to capture his unwilling attention that she performed her graceful antics. Between these two there was something half-sensed and deeply hidden. . . . As though his latent masculinity were lying in wait for her . . . as though some as yet undeveloped feminine quality in herself were luring him, spurring him on and yet evading him.

  But today, Nicholas’ attention wavered; it wandered to Phebe, flickered once more to Marise and returned again to the little blonde girl, lost in the wonder and halo of her bright gilt hair; caught by the mystic chasteness lent her by her swathing, snowy robe and the foamlike, diaphanous aureole with which her veil invested her. Phebe did a solo dance. In the fantasy which they were evolving together with an ease born of many spontaneous rehearsals, she was a butterfly. There was about her none of the sinuous virtuosity of Marise . . . whatever Phebe did, she did from a need to express herself, so, and not otherwise. She was a quiet, intense, independent little girl, made up of strange loyalties and predilections and almost as single-minded as Olivia Cary, the mother of her little playmate, Teresa.

  Today, feeling within her the need for light, airy movement, she bent all her attention to expressing her concept of not only the motion, but the essential feeling, of the butterfly. She could not have explained to anyone what she was trying to depict; but she knew, it seemed to her, the special thrill which the lovely creature must feel when it knows itself able to yield completely to the caress of light and sun and air . . . to feel itself one with the essence of nature. Absorbed in this bewildering and yet related congeries of whirling and dipping and fluttering, she forgot her audience until she looked up to catch the eyes of Nicholas fastened upon her with the admiration and astonishment which she had sometimes seen in the glances she had occasionally intercepted in their course toward Marise.

  This phenomenon brought her to herself; she subsided blushing and confused. Phebe did not want to be an actress. She did want, however, someday to read in the eyes of one man, just such admiration as she had read in the eyes of Nicholas . . . only it should be many times intensified. . . . And she hoped the man would be Nicholas.

  Mrs. Davies appeared with a tray of small, delicious sandwiches and cakes. She and her husband were caterers, serving the city’s most exclusive. “I’m awful busy today,” she told her delighted guests, “but I just put my head in to tell you I hope you’re all happy.”

  As usual Teresa gravitated toward her and, as usual, received a word and a slight caress. For a fleeting moment Mrs. Davies put a warm arm about her. “You look a little peaked, Honey. Eat a lot of them sandwiches and join in and sing and dance with the rest of them. Don’t let yourself be too quiet, you’re only young once, you know.”

  The homely, kindly words lit a glow about the child’s chilled, apprehensive heart. Riding home in the Girard Avenue car, she saw visions ahead of her in the misty twilight and forgot all about Olivia’s silly plans and her own fears and quakes. She would grow up and have four children. All of them should be like her little brother Oliver and she would be a mother like Mrs. Davies. . . . In her own house her brother Christopher greeted her uproariously; glad to have someone to serve as auditor of his baseball exploits. . . . Presently Dr. Cary came in and they had dinner, Teresa presiding with pride and solicitude. . . . Her father produced a little letter from Oliver, blotted, but otherwise quite clean and remarkably free of errors. . . . The house was full of a warm cosiness and a sense of home. . . . Teresa hoped that her mother would not retu
rn for a long time.

  CHAPTER III

  THAT afternoon Nicholas walked home with Phebe as he had walked home many days. For their houses stood back to back with each other; his on the main street, hers on the small one with the inevitable Philadelphia alley between. They had as a matter of fact met in the alley, each from the vantage of a mother’s side as their respective parents bought “fresh Delaware porgies.”

  The handsome little brown boy had stared at the amazing feminine apparition of snow and gilt. He had stared at her so intensely that he scowled and the apparition had retreated behind a broad back. Once more within his own domain he asked his mother: “Ma, is she a fairy?”

  Mrs. Campbell laughed. “No, son. She’s a real little girl just like you’re a real little boy.”

  “Was that her mother?”

  “I think so, son.”

  Son considered. “But, Ma, how can that be her mother? She’s white, ain’t she?”

  “No, son. She’s colored.”

  “But, Ma, how can she be?”

  “Well, she just is. Lots of colored people look like that. But they’re colored right on.”

  “But if she ain’t white, why ain’t she white? She’s whiter than lots of those white girls at our school. What makes her colored and makes those white girls white?”

  “Well, son, I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to wait till you’re grown up. . . . You’ll understand those things better then, I think.”