At the end Marise came up to her—glowing, beautiful as a great dark red rose. Half the day she had helped her mother prepare for the party; she had danced all the night; but there was not a trace of fatigue on her smooth brown countenance. She touched Teresa’s face, colorlessly creamy save for its virgin tracing of lip-rouge . . . she took her face between her warm soft palms. “Teresa,” she said, “have a good time; don’t bother about anything else.” She shook her slightly. “Now remember, don’t worry about anything!”
Nicholas took her hand in his hard, cool grasp: “Don’t forget me, Teresa!”
Phebe said she would see her at the train the day she left.
Mrs. Davies put her warm arms about her. “You were always my girl, Teresa. Be happy, Honey!”
And on that note she left them.
After all it was only one o’clock. . . . The party had begun with a seven o’clock dinner. The night was too perfect, too enticing. The lament of the passing summer got into one’s blood. One must weep . . . or laugh . . . in either case for the mere blessing of being alive.
Over her fragile dress Phebe wore a bright, dark blue velvet coat. It had belonged once to Mrs. Morton Rogers, for whom her mother worked in Sharon Hill. . . . At the neck was a palely gilded clasp which Nicholas fastened. He looked from the clasp to Phebe’s gilt hair and for a moment his heart caught in his throat. The spell of the summer night and Phebe’s fairness and sweetness and his demanding blood lay thick about him for a moment.
Two short blocks lay between them and the vast, serenely silver park. “We’ll go over and sit on George’s Hill a moment,” he suggested. “We can see the Fifty-second Street car coming up the Avenue then; they are so slow, one won’t be by again for a long time. Then we’ll ride over to Girard and walk to your house. . . . I like to walk along sleeping streets. I wonder,” he said whimsically, “if they ever remember the woods and forests they used to be.”
Phebe loved to hear him ramble like this . . . she knew he expected no answer; it was as though he were communing with himself in his own mind . . . how close to himself he must feel her!
“I often think of telegraph poles,” he went on, smoking with the negligent languor that she so much admired. “I think it’s so hard on them to lose all their lovely, graceful leaves and branches and stand so stark and plain on ugly, city streets.” . . . They were on the Hill now and the great, ungainly city sprawled before them. . . . “I wonder how these fortunate trees in the Park feel about it”
Phebe heard him, not listening. She was thinking no one, just no one in the world looked like Nicholas. His hat lay on the bench beside him; his dark face with that Apollo-like look, which the sculptured waviness of his hair bestowed upon him, was finely silhouetted against the moonlight with the softness of the black night for an immediate background. His careless beauty, his masterfulness made her heart turn over. . . . If they were only older! . . .
She meant to be a perfect wife, very sweet and true and kind . . . and loyal. She would be very loyal! “A rock,” as the hymn said, “in a weary land.”
Everybody had trouble; her mother had taught her to accept it stoically, philosophically. But her mother had told her too: “I didn’t mind my trouble so much after you come, little daughter. . . . Always you loved yore ole mammy so! . . . It don’ make much difference about trouble if you has someone who you kin always depend on”
She had pronounced it “depind.” . . .
So Phebe had always been dependable. . . . And that was the quality she would bring some day to Nicholas.
He had forsaken the telegraph poles and begun to talk of Teresa. “I wonder what she’s going to be like. . . . Wasn’t she different tonight? What was it? Just her dress, I wonder? She was almost pretty. Not really pretty like you or Marise . . . but she made you want to look at her and dance with her. . . .”
“She was happy,” interpreted happy Phebe. . . . “But her dress helped a lot. Her mother let her get it herself and we picked it out together. It was like her, you know; warm and cool too. . . . And because it made her look the way she ought to look and she liked it, that made her happy. And that made her pretty.”
“H’m, think you know all about it, don’t you, Miss?”
“I do,” said Phebe sagely, “know everything about clothes. I can feel it. . . . Clothes can do everything to you. . . . You know, Nicholas, I’m not really pretty either but I know how to make the most of myself.”
“I’m not going to pay you compliments,” he assured her unsmiling.
“Don’t want them.” Was her heart not already singing with his former spontaneous praise?
Nicholas was musing again. “I feel, Phebe, that after tonight things are going to be different for our little bunch. Teresa’s gone, Christopher’s going next year. I’ve got to go to work this summer. You’re coming out of high school. . . . What did you decide to do? Teach?”
“Here comes the car,” she reminded him. “I must get home. . . . No, I don’t like teaching. . . . My mother sews for Mrs. Morton Rogers; she sent me this coat, Nicky; didn’t you wonder how I could be so grand? She’s taking my mother to Florida with her next winter, and she’s giving me courses in dress designing this summer and next winter . . I’m going to look after her daughters’ clothes while she’s away. . . . If she likes me and I make progress, she may set me up. . . . Pretty nice?”
“Can’t say I like it so much.” Nicholas scowled at the two white men opposite them in the car who, he thought, were regarding Phebe too intently. “Has she ever seen you? She may not like you. Lots of white people don’t like these white colored people, you know.”
She nodded gravely. “Yes, that is so. I had a teacher in the graded school who couldn’t bear me after I told her I was colored.”
“You certainly are straight about that, aren’t you? Not a bit like Teresa.”
“I always told you that wasn’t Teresa’s doing. That’s her mother’s foolishness. Come on, Nick, we must get off here.”
As they passed the other two passengers she distinctly heard one of them say: “That certainly is a white girl with that coon!” She hoped Nicholas didn’t hear them. As they passed through the quiet streets it seemed to her that he was unusually silent.
“Marise,” she said desperately, “Marise is going to have the nicest time of anyone. She’s always wanted to go to Chicago and her father’s going to take her there for a graduation present this summer. Then in the fall she’s to study music and dancing . . . perhaps in New York. I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said, stopping before her unremarkable dwelling, “if she were to go on the stage. Marise always gets what she wants.”
“Does she?” He spoke absently. “Good-night, Phebe. I’ll stand here till you lock the door.”
Good-night and he hadn’t kissed her! The last time they had been to a party, he had put his arm about her—she could feel it now—and he had bent down to her uplifted, unsuspecting face; had set his lips against hers.
The summer evening turned cold. The charm of the party was ashes.
Mrs. Morton Rogers, thrifty social registerite, would have been surprised to see her blue velvet cloak a dishevelled careless heap on the floor where a disappointed girl had dropped it in her hurry to bury her face in a friendly pillow.
III
TERESA’S ACT
CHAPTER I
CHRISTIE’S ACADEMY, the prospectus said, catered to a small select group of girls; girls whose parents felt that the contact of young minds with superior and highly cultivated mentalities was more educative than the assimilation of the contents of many volumes.
Not that learning from books was to be despised. It was simply, the prospectus hinted, that Christie’s was able to offer more than that. Thus while its college preparatory course was surpassed by no other school, parents, who did not intend to give their children more training after they had left these academic walls, would find their offspring still remarkably fitted to join battle with Life.
This
desirable end was wrought by the “contact of young minds with superior and highly cultivated mentalities.” In order to further this end, only a few, and highly recommended students were admitted each year.
Dr. Cary felt the selectiveness and paucity of numbers, too, was really caused by the certainly unusually high tuition and boarding fees. But no other school, it seemed, would suit Olivia. Teresa was barely consulted on the matter, but since she did not want to leave Philadelphia anyway it is possible that one school seemed as good to her as another.
Olivia did not inform either her husband or her daughter of the precaution which she had taken which had really made her choice of this school unshakeable. On one of her rare visits to her mother and to Oliver, she had slipped away from Boston and gone just over the state border-line to Christie’s in New Hampshire. She had been delighted with the comparative inaccessibility of the place and with the appearance and type of girl whom she had found there.
Most of the students were the children of people belonging to the upper middle-class; people whose names never appeared in the papers, who took themselves and their positions seriously and sensibly. The men of this group were probably pillars in their respective communities, thoroughly American and for the most part New England American.
A few girls were recruited from the West and one or two from the South. When Olivia was there, the catalogue contained the names of two girls registered from Virginia. By careful questioning she elicited the information that while the school had no objection to foreigners, Negroes nor Jews, it happened that none had ever registered within their portals. And since the school advertised very little it seemed most improbable that any would apply; although of course you never could tell.
Accordingly Teresa was registered at Christie’s with the understanding that she should enter college under its auspices. It was the acquaintances and “contacts” which Teresa should make in college on which her mother based her ultimate hopes. But she was sending her daughter to a preparatory school in order to provide her in the first place with a perfect spring-board from which to make her leap into such college circles as should best further her, or rather Olivia’s, interest.
Teresa proved unexpectedly docile. She had to get her education someway, somewhere, she supposed. Lots of girls were crazy to get away from home. She would make the best of this. She would be uncomplaining, studious and contented. There were two or three sports in which she would like to excel, notably tennis and rowing. . . .
Perhaps if she kept to herself, made practically no friends under these false pretenses, her mother might give her up as a bad job and when the two years were over she could go comfortably to Howard or Fisk. All this optimism was engendered in her as a result of Marise’s party and the definite promises of that young lady and of Phebe never to forget her and never to let anyone else take her place.
But presently in the charm and novelty of the new life to which she was introduced she forgot all about her intentions. The girls, of course, unquestionably accepted her as white; the absence of any other colored girl took away any sense of strain or disloyalty to her own.
She herself was totally without either social ambition or the desire to advance herself in any particular. Her father’s people on his father’s side had been in Philadelphia long before 1782; her paternal grandmother had an almost similar record of family integrity, only changing the milieu to Charleston. Dr. Cary, her father, was finely and adequately trained. And the Great War had made him almost affluent. Her mother was a product of the Boston Latin School and of a refinement almost overwhelming—Teresa thought when she gave the matter any attention. There was little, she recognized, that these students could give her which she did not already possess.
The last week in September, the whole month of October passed. Teresa was naturally studious and not dull. While never interested in making a record she would have despised herself if she had slipped back in her classes. And in spite of her lack of ambition she was beginning to attract attention with her tennis which she played with an ardor quite at variance with her habitual restraint. This interest in sports threw her in touch with some of the more outstanding girls in the school; already her outlook was broadening; her mind maturing.
She was registered of course with Juniors. For some reason the girls of her class averaged from eight months to a year older than she and acted accordingly. In order to offset the essential childishness of her own viewpoint she could feel herself cultivating self-confidence and assurance.
Among these girls, she had no particular chum. Young as she was she felt a delicacy about striking up an intimacy based on an implication of falsehood. About her there was never any sense of racial inferiority. If her mother had left her to herself she would have spread casually the fact of her mixed blood to her immediate associates, but even then only as occasion demanded it. And she knew that without any doubt many of these girls would have been her friends; they would have known her absolutely as she was without reserves. . . . Marise, for instance, patently colored, was one of the most popular girls ever known in West Philadelphia.
These New England girls with their orderly decorous minds appealed to her strongly. . . . Among them she would have liked to find a comrade. . . . On the other hand the infiltration of such Negro blood as flowed in her veins lent to her a warmth and ready friendliness which the Yankee girls admired and were ready to welcome.
If she could only have been herself, she thought. Perhaps later on when she came to know them better, she could entrust her secret to a select few. Her very frankness might make them admire her more. . . . Again there would always be some who would resent the hoax. And too, she knew that these girls would hardly be able to understand what it was that her mother was evading. . . . In this part of the world they would never see her, for instance, subjected to the heartbreak, the worry and discrimination which people of her appearance, carefully marked and tagged by public memory, would meet in their communities in the South; or with the deadly insult and indignity which her darker racial kinsmen would encounter anywhere.
One girl, however, Ellen Ware, could not be gainsaid. She was a splendid athlete, a good student, with original somewhat iconoclastic ideas. She liked to talk, and as Teresa was both a good and a retentive listener, so that she really knew where you left off, Ellen’s slightly super-egocentric needs fastened upon her. Gradually, Teresa, sensing the real and generous self which underlay all this superficial self-expression, grew to be very fond of her. Partly because it pleased her immensely, a girl so rarely sought after, to be the preferred chum of one of the wealthiest, most capable and most influential girls in the school, but still more for another reason. Ellen, who talked about everything under the sun, discoursed from time to time on problems of race, color, religion and social preferment. These were a few of her hobbies which really, Teresa discovered, included everything that could be discussed within the realm of her knowledge under the sun. What she had to say pleased the young Philadelphian immensely.
“She’s all straight on this race business,” Teresa wrote Chris happily. “I’d get her to come home with me Christmas if I’d only told her about things in the first place. . . . As it is she wants me to go home with her. But I’m not going to do that either. I don’t think it’s quite the thing. . . . What do you say, Chris?”
Life now, she had to admit, was very pleasant. . . . She loved the cold, hard New Hampshire fall, the small informal classes, the granite farmer folk of the neighborhood, the simple pieties of many of the girls, the slight formal quality of the frequent teas designed to bring students into “contact with superior minds.”
Christie’s, save for these qualities, was very little different in its curriculum from any other good high school . . . it was the absence of the continual strain under which she lived at home that endeared this experience. She missed pleasantly her mother’s feverishly concentrated ambitions, her father’s frustration showing so plainly even through his material success; she felt the falseness of he
r mother’s stand drop away from her and with that the consequent resentment and opposition which she and young Christopher were so often forced futilely to display.
Gradually even Marise and Phebe and Nicholas faded into a background of distance and dimness. Compared with the cool sexlessness of this life with its quota of sports and games, of lessons, of self-imposed scholastic tasks, of endless debates on what she felt were “real things,” Marise and her pleasures seemed needlessly exotic, prematurely forced and useless. Phebe and her difficult, narrow little life struck her as pitiful and empty.
It seemed to her that she herself was living in a vortex, a pleasantly manageable vortex, of many choices of interest. She felt proudly, immensely, free to make a selection which should carry her off once more into newer, increasingly splendid fields of interest. She was, of course, too young to understand that having once chosen her pursuit or fields of endeavor, her profession or hobby, life would begin to dwindle again until it reached the proportions accepted and endured by most people.
So the day passed filled with study, hiking, the chatter at mealtimes, endless rehearsals for the inevitable “stunt,” preparation of lessons. Filled too with talking, talking, talking in dormitory rooms after the cold black New England night had dropped down about the school buildings, bringing with it, through sheer contrast, a renewed sense of safety, warmth and comfort.
Ellen Ware was usually at the heart of all discussions. She was passionately interested in people, their rights and privileges, the responsibility of better “conditioned” classes toward those not so fortunate.
Comedy_American Style Page 6