“Well, that’s that. . . . Let’s go see if we can grab the north tennis court before Maude Parker settles on it permanently.”
Teresa wrote her brother. “Do you think I could manage it, Chris?”
He wrote back. “No, of course not. You know she’d be swarming all over Christie’s at first to see what Alicia was like and she a judge’s daughter too. . . . But there’s just the barest chance that she may go to Switzerland to some Peace Movement thing. I’ll let you know.”
For once the gods were kind. Olivia went to Europe and Teresa went to Chicago. Her mother, carried away with her own trip “and what it might mean,” was too busy even to run up to Christie’s to tell her daughter good-bye. But she wrote her: “I’m so glad, my dear child, that things are turning out so well with you. You say that Alicia’s father is a judge. They must move in very good circles. I hope you won’t fail to take advantage of your new relationships”
The long trip half way across the continent drew the girls ever more closely together. The immediate effect of this, however, was to fasten upon Teresa a sense of guilt. She felt herself burdened, worn down with secrecy. At times she knew hardly whether to laugh or to cry at the two-edged complication which her duplicity had begun to assume. To pretend to Caucasians that she was white was one thing; but to pretend it with her best friend, whom she truly loved and who was also colored, was different.
On the train many glances of curiosity were directed toward them; toward Alicia’s air of style and breeding; toward Teresa’s quiet distinctiveness; toward the still somewhat curious sight of a white and colored girl travelling together. Of the two Alicia was by far the more self-conscious though she made a successful effort to conceal this fact. But her friend’s serene, unnoticing demeanor seemed to her worthy of the utmost admiration which she could bestow. In a final burst of appreciation she bestowed on Teresa her highest praise.
“You really are wonderful, Tess. You know if—if only things were different, I wish you and Alex would fall in love with each other and marry.”
“Tell me what you mean by ‘different’.”
“If you were only colored.”
Teresa considered. How wonderful it would be to live, act, breathe, be one’s very own self. . . . “Alicia, darling, can I really trust you? I want so much to tell you . . . but I always have to think of my mother. I’m not white really. . . . I’m colored. I love being colored . . . but Mother has always been so set on passing. . . . She was never willing for a colored girl even to come and play with me. . . . She wouldn’t even have them work for us.”
“But she knows you’re with me. . . .”
“But she doesn’t know you’re colored. . . .”
Alicia stared at her, astonished and admiring. “Why, Teresa, I never thought you had it in you. . . .”
The vacation was heavenly. Mr. and Mrs. Barrett were youngish people ardently beloved by their family and usually included in all their doings. The judge was on his vacation and as keen on making the most of it as a youth. Both were interested in the plight of Teresa. The two elders enjoyed quietly the joke which she was playing on her mother and determined that her good times should have no limit.
With real delicacy they pledged themselves not to let her new friends and acquaintances know of the strange conflict in which she had been participating. To them she was frankly a “white colored girl” who struck them at times as being “more white than the average white person.”
Such after all had been the influence of the young girl’s earlier training that for a time she found herself no more at home with this large colored group than she had felt with the white group when she first went to Christie’s. Estranged, through lack of interest, from the latter group she was equally estranged, at least, from the first group, by lack of experience. For a little while it seemed as though they did not speak the same language. All her acquaintance and intimacy with Alicia had been based on the common school-life which they shared. Her carefully preserved secret of those days kept the two of them from building or developing the qualities of sympathy, understanding, pride, even joy around their common heritage.
So with these new acquaintances. In her comprehension of their conversation and intercourse there were often strange lacunae, even strange ignorances because Teresa was not fully aware of underlying, fundamental causes prompting the conditions which were being discussed. . . . “Race Topics” interested her without piquing her. Discussions of overt acts against Negroes, prompted by rank prejudice, left her indignant, as a humanitarian might be indignant, but not disturbed as a member of the maltreated race should be.
Emotionally, as far as race was concerned, she was a girl without a country. . . . Later on in life it occurred to her that she had been deprived of her racial birthright and that that was as great a cause for tears as any indignity that might befall man.
With no conscious volition on her part a metamorphosis had been achieved. She had become, and she would always remain, individual and aloof, never a part of a component whole.
Alicia’s brother Alexander came swimming into her ken. He was as fine looking as Alicia but with more distinction, both because he was older and because from his childhood he had carried within himself a great sense of seriousness with regard to his chosen profession. . . . His father would have liked him to enter political life. . . .
The older man had found Chicago politics a source not only of profit and power but of amusement and lasting interest. . . . But his son had other visions. . . . He would be not only a physician with a desirably lucrative practice . . . he would be a great healer alleviating the woes of mankind. . . . Excepting for his sports, to which he was passionately devoted, he kept this serious attitude toward most of the happenings of life.
Mrs. Barrett had acquainted him with something of Teresa’s earlier history. It was from herself that her son inherited both his seriousness and his broad outlook. Her own sensitiveness divined the impression which the problem of their young guest would leave on Alex’s mind. And as she wanted the girl to meet, this one summer at least, with all compensatory attentions possible she could, she felt, do nothing better than to turn her over to the wise and delicate ministrations of her boy. All through her life Teresa possessed the faculty of awakening in all women, save in her mother paradoxically enough, reactions of the most maternal and tender type.
Without this special knowledge, Alex, who at this point was manifesting practically no interest in girls, would have seen in the young Philadelphian only another one of Alicia’s occasional crushes. . . . But this girl, he quickly divined, was someone different and apart. He had, of course, known many people who consistently or intermittently “passed” either as a matter of desire or as a matter of convenience. . . .
But Teresa was the first person in his ken who had so thoroughly rebelled against the deception. . . . Other acquaintances had carried on this gesture of whiteness with pride, with amusement, with a sense of perpetrating a huge joke. But to this eighteen-year-old girl the process had already brought misery, embarrassment and the hint of future wretchedness. Alexander perhaps was to be the only acquaintance of her whole life who was able to realize how unspeakably distasteful the whole sorry performance was to such a character. . . .
He liked America. A year in Europe had taught him something of the imperfections of most governments. He was not the type of Negro to disassociate the value of a creed of race equality from the worth of economic opportunity. . . . At twenty-three, being an American of some training and thought and of his national quota of materialism, he had no doubts as to the desirability of being a technically free, but starving, Negro in France or England and a practically free Negro living in the northern United States in relative security and comfort. . . .
But he did think America might by now try to live up to some of the tall sayings and implications of her founders . . . if only there could be some way of showing her the spiritual waste which annually she inflicted on a beautiful and deserving group!
Meanwhile he could help.
At first he approached Teresa purely, one might say, from the standpoint of spiritual therapeutics. . . . He could be the physician for her wounded soul as completely as later on he hoped to be the physician for many an aching and wounded body. . . . But gradually, as the charming golden days slipped by, his boyish patronage took on the tinge of something deeper. Teresa walked with him, played tennis, swam, and above all, rowed with him a few times late in the hot summer evenings . . . she strummed inexpertly at “a slim guitar,” for so she always thought of the ukelele in her hands; she told him slowly and painfully of her father’s baffled efforts to establish himself definitely as a “race man.” She spoke of her own and Christopher’s disgust and resentment at having to live a sham . . . which after all got them, in Philadelphia at least, exactly nowhere. . . .
“The neighbors, I’m sure, think we are just what we are . . . colored people trying to be white . . . they see father’s colored patients . . . they’ve probably seen mother practically driving, when we were children, our little colored friends from the door. . . . Now that we’re grown up, very few colored people invite us to their houses, except those folks I’m always talking about, Phebe and Marise and Nick Campbell. . . . You see, we can’t ask them back in turn.” She was silently trailing her fine creamy hand in the curling water. . . . “I don’t think that’s the reason though . . . there are all sorts of causes, all mixed up. You know how colored people are about passing. . . .”
Alex, looking at her through a cloud of smoke, nodded, thinking how nice and fine she was and truly different with her slightly bewildered air of a child trying to find her way.
“Yes, I know. A combination of cooperation and resentment. They don’t want to cramp your style. Yet on the other hand no one likes to think that he just isn’t, in your eyes at any rate, good enough for your association.”
“That’s just it.”
He fell to dreaming how he would take her out of all this; this nice gentle lady who treasured honesty and un-pretentiousness above many apparent advantages. She was restful; as intelligent as Alicia, whom he so deeply admired, but not so brilliant. . . . The three of them could live together. She was so young now. Within the next two or three years he would tell her about it. . . . Meanwhile they must finish school. There would be long revealing letters flashing across the continent from Chicago to some place in the East. . . . Thus they would become truly acquainted. It would be much more expedient, even kinder, to wait.
He might have spared himself his chivalry. Teresa had already fallen in love with Henry Bates.
CHAPTER IV
THE old aphorisms are basically sound. First impressions are lasting. It would never have occurred to Teresa to fall in love with Nicholas, certainly not as long as Phebe was in the offing. Or Marise. A little wave of vicarious fear for Phebe swept across her whenever she thought of Marise and Nicky.
As she had told Alicia when they spoke of love in the dormitory at Christie’s, she had never been in love. But Nick unconsciously (was he really so unconscious of his own power?) had stirred her . . . she had known that the type for her. And here was Henry, just as hopelessly, heart-breakingly, attractive, the possessor of that same devastating masculinity, just as he possessed that same combination of color, recklessness, hair, manner which marked Nick. It is a combination which belongs to one special type of the American Negro of mixed blood, the chestnut brown. And there is no other species of mankind which possesses just that same fatalness of charm except perhaps a certain type of Irishmen. Such men begin to know their power early. . . .
Alex was grave, studious, kindly, dependable. Henry was carefree, with little interest for anything except his hobbies which might range from engineering to aviation. His kindness had about it a carelessness as of one bestowing largess. His emotions were, to say the least, of the school of the will O’ the wisp. . . . For all these reasons Teresa loved him.
With his reckless gayety he represented to her all the good times she had missed during her life. So sincere was she in her obvious admiration, even adoration, that Henry, all serenely used as he was to the “falling of frails,” went from passive endurance to something warmer, from that degree to a genuine gratitude, from gratitude to a love that not only amazed the scoffing and totally unenvious Alicia but even himself. . . . The quality of his feeling surprised least of all its recipient—Teresa. Love, if it existed at all, should be just like this of Henry’s—ardent, tender, rapturous, laughing.
They became engaged.
“But of course,” said Teresa tardily, “my mother will never consent to it.” She had never mentioned to Henry her great secret which now seemed so trivial.
“I know,” he agreed sagely. “She’ll say you’re too young. But time will remedy that. Bofe on us has got to get heaps an’ heaps mo’ education than we has yet, Honey.” She loved him to relapse into the soft lingo of the southern immigrant whom he mimicked so perfectly. “By the time I am a full fledged engineer, and that’s two years off, you’ll be old enough. An aged woman of twenty and a doddering old man of twenty-three. That’s old enough for anybody to marry.”
“Two years from now,” she mused. “Wonder what we’ll be like then.”
“We won’t have to wonder, Hon. You forget we’ll be seeing each other right straight along, watching each other grow. We won’t have to ask: ‘How high is the baby?’ We’ll know.”
He was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I keep forgetting,” she said, “that you spend most of your time in the East. . . . It doesn’t seem possible that you could have been so near me these past two years and I never even knew anything about it.”
“Dumb, I calls it,” he acquiesced. “But you see old Fate knew what was what. So all of a sudden she horned in and brought us together. Darn near close job she made of it too. . . . You know I’ve always worked in the summers, Teresa. Bell-hop on the big coastwise boats. It was literally touch and go with me as to whether I should take up my old stand this summer. But gosh I was so tired. Six years now I’ve been at this Higher Education working hard all term and almost all of every summer. So I decided to take some time off.”
“Are you glad now?”
“I won’t say I’m sorry.”
“Coming to see me soon?”
“And often,” he promised with a whimsical accent on the and. She loved his deliberate negroid inflection from which her mother had so carefully guarded her.
For a moment she considered telling him about that strange unreal life of hers in Philadelphia with its pain and deception. But after all what was the use? . . . It was all over now. There would be just these two years to wait. He would be sure of a position; Judge Barrett had promised to see to that. All he had to do was to graduate. . . .
“Which I’ll over do,” he promised her.
They would of course have to marry in secret. Probably, since there would be simply no means of converting Olivia, they would have to elope. She might of course invoke her grandmother’s or even Christopher’s aid. But on the whole she rather clung, in her secret thoughts, to the idea of keeping the project within her own and Henry’s extremely capable hands. . . . After all she was to have love, excitement, life, experience just like other girls.
Alicia was not to go back to the East. She was to attend Northwestern. Teresa had already matriculated at Smith. But before registering at Northampton she would return to Philadelphia to spend the last two weeks of her vacation. Her mother would shortly be returning and the girl was eager to face her—with this new dear secret locked so tight in her breast. Her mother, as Christopher had warned her, would probably after this triumphant tour be at the point least consonant with her ideas of motherhood based as they were on pleasant memories of Mrs. Davies and Mrs. Barrett. . . . But, preceding all this strain, there would be the pleasant fortnight spent with her father and Christopher and Oliver. Dear Oliver! She told Alicia about him, sketching in with some
reluctance her mother’s neglect.
“Poor kid,” sympathized Alicia. “When you come back here to live, Teresa, you must bring him with you. Then you can make up to him for everything.”
“I will,” her friend vowed warmly. . . . “How good it sounds to hear you say: ‘When you come back here to live!’ . . . Oh, Alicia, isn’t it too grand? . . . You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Mind what?”
“Why, about Henry and me. . . . You know I never thought once of this when you told me about him back there at Christie’s. . . . Doesn’t it all sound ‘far away and long ago’ now? . . . You said you and he had all broken up.”
“Teresa, don’t be silly. You don’t know me. When I am through I am absolutely through. Not that he isn’t a darling. Henry is positively the sweetest. But we probably wouldn’t remain together five months. Too much alike. Both selfish, you know, and demanding. While you, Old Sweetness, you never ask for anything . . . and so you get it all.
“You were simply made for Henry, though I still rise to state that it would have made me much happier if you had fallen for old Alex. Perhaps you’d have been happier too. . . . But there, taste is taste; and if anybody likes the kind of a man that Henery Bates is going to be, why, then I say Henery Bates is just the kind of man for a person like that. . . . Only, Teresa, I’m warning you don’t ever let him get a mad on you. . . .”
“Why should he get a mad on me? And if he did, what about it?”
“Well, there’s this color business. Just don’t do it I’m warning you . . . at least not until after you get married. That boy is terribly hard-headed . . . the kind that goes rushing off into space . . . once he gets started, with no return ticket.”
“Oh piffle!” said Teresa, happily slangy. “You can’t scare me. He’s not going rushing off into space without me right in his inner pocket.”
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