Weeks had passed since Cleo had made amends on the air but when her invitation to the New School meeting arrived in the mail, her first response was, no thanks, I already gave blood at the office. What changed her mind was the impressive list of confirmed participants; if all those honchos were willing to give up a spring Sunday afternoon to repair the black-Jewish relationship, there was definitely a new development to the old story. She decided to go to the meeting, though not without trepidation. Her apology to the Jews had ruffled some feathers in the black community. What if, in the course of the meeting, she found herself disagreeing with something a black person said? Would she be afraid to break ranks a second time? Would other blacks see her as an incorrigible turncoat? By the same token, if she disagreed with something a Jewish participant said, would she unconsciously censor herself to appease those Jews who had not forgiven her for the Shameful Show?
Now, thinking back on her behavior at the meeting, she asked herself a different round of questions: Had she hassled Rabbi Kahn and Professor Fingerhut because she was genuinely annoyed at their condescension—or was she trying to prove to her own cohort that she could still be tough on the Jews? Had she been honest when she challenged the premise of the group or was she preemptively discrediting it to avoid joining in a dialogue that might expose her complicated childhood loyalties? More than anything, Cleo hoped her prickliness hadn’t offended Jeremiah Birmingham, on whom she had once bestowed her highest praise: Honorary Woman. Jerry didn’t just talk the talk about supporting women and girls, he walked the walk day in and day out, ran a child care center in the basement of his Harlem church, and sponsored a rape crisis hotline and a project that trained men and boys to manage their anger and quit equating manhood with dominance. Besides Jerry’s good works, what most endeared him to Cleo, she realized, was his uncanny resemblance to her father.
From the Adam’s apple that bobbled above his clerical collar to his ministerial flourishes, Pastor Jeremiah Birmingham was a taller, darker, more urbane version of Pastor Isaiah Scott. At the beginning of the meeting, as the minister welcomed the attendees, spread his arms, pausing for a moment in the cruciform position, then swept his long, bony fingers forward as if to gather the entire group in his embrace, Cleo remembered her father performing similar sorcery in his pulpit. Jerry’s singsong cadences, too, were hauntingly familiar: “If you’re fed up with black-Jewish enmity but haven’t given up hope, then you’ve come to the right place. If you’ve had it with the petulance and howling but you haven’t given up on the possibility of healing, then you’ve come to the right place. If you feel angry and frustrated but you still believe the pursuit of peace is as sanctified as the fight for justice, then you’ve come to the right place.”
Her daddy used to talk like that, sprinkling “ifs” the way a Catholic priest sprinkles holy water. After Ifs’s funeral, Cleo had found the draft of his last sermon on his desk—the one he’d been writing before he took Josie for ice cream—and slipped it between the pages of her journal, whose entries stopped the day he died. Christ had no female disciples and the church had yet to see a woman ordained, yet at ten years old Cleo wanted to be a preacher like her daddy. And she became one, in her fashion.
When Jeremiah Birmingham told the group at the New School that they had the power to end the strife between blacks and Jews, Cleo almost expected him to prove his point by quoting Ifs’s last sermon. She didn’t have to read it to remember it:
A Native American wisewoman became distraught over the growing animosity between her people and a neighboring tribe. One day, she was sitting before her tent, struggling with her thoughts, when her grandson came by.
“What’s the matter, Grandmother?” he asked, noticing her distress.
“A terrible fight is going on inside me,” replied the wisewoman. “A fight between two wolves. One wolf is full of anger and hatred, vindictiveness and violence. The other is full of joy and forgiveness, understanding and love.”
The boy looked very frightened. “Which wolf will win?” he asked his grandmother.
“The one I feed,” she said.
CHAPTER 10
THE DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
WHEN HE CAME TO HER STUDIO AND TOOK THE GUEST’S chair, Zach expected Cleo to badger him on the air. But the combativeness he’d seen that afternoon was gone; she was a gracious host and he was more than delighted when she suggested that they continue their conversation over dinner at a restaurant a few blocks from the station. Black-Jewish relations and similarly weighty topics were shelved in favor of martinis and conversation about their pet peeves, childhood fears, and most embarrassing moments.
It was nearly midnight when he walked Cleo to her apartment building on Central Park West at the corner of 103rd Street. She didn’t ask him up but casually let drop the fact that the NBA press office had sent her a couple of courtside comps for the first game of the Knicks vs. Pistons playoffs the following night. “Any interest?”
“Are you kidding, Cleo? Absolutely.”
They met in front of the box office at Madison Square Garden. After the game, they went to a bar across the street and had Irish coffee and again, they talked for two hours without mentioning politics or the Black-Jewish Coalition, this time bonding over their mutual disdain for cooked carrots, Strom Thurmond, and Pink Floyd, and their shared enthusiasm for fried artichokes, Thelonius Monk, and walking the city’s streets at any hour of the day or night.
How could he not want to kiss her after that? How could he not want to see her again? Nothing serious, of course, just a lark, a short detour before he continued the search for his bashert. Since her religion ruled her out, a dalliance with Cleo felt safe to him. Within a week after they met, he was seeing her every night, convinced all the while that his feelings for her, though intense, would peter out like a teen crush. Instead, the relationship deepened. She complemented him in so many ways that he had to keep reminding himself of the difference that made all the difference.
Religion wasn’t the only hurdle. The first time she invited him up to her apartment and he saw the display in her living room, her tchotchkes freaked him out and it occurred to him that Cleo might be as crazy as some of her callers. There, under track lights, arranged on shelves like rare archaeological finds, stood black figurines in various poses of humiliation—manic-looking pickaninies, slack-jawed Stepin Fetchits, mammies with pendulous breasts—as well as tobacco tins, calendars, ashtrays, chamber pots, and toothpick holders decorated with similarly denigrating black caricatures. A banjo man clock with a coal-black face and protruding white-orbed eyes hung on the wall, the eyes clicking from side to side like a metronome, making him look like a shifty-eyed thief. There was a shoe box marked “Postcards: Pickaninies, Cannibals, Lynchings, Etc.” Three Aunt Jemima cookie jars. A menu from a place called “Coon Inn,” a sign that said “Colored Drinking Fountain.” A mechanized “Jolly Nigger Bank.”
“Who’s your interior decorator, Jim Crow?” Zach asked, unsure of how else to react. It embarrassed him just to be looking at the racist relics.
Cleo took a nickel from the dish of coins beside a cast-iron black head and placed it on the “Jolly Nigger’s” outstretched tongue, which retracted into the head and instantly emerged empty, as if the coin had been a minnow swallowed by a shark.
“Local banks used to give these out as bonus gifts when you signed up for a savings account,” she said. “And not because black people were signifiers of thriftiness or financial prudence. On the contrary; this guy is meant to evoke a beggar with his hand out or a thief stealing your nickel. He symbolizes negro shiftlessness.”
Zach mumbled, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
She seemed to take that as a compliment. “These days the stuff is hard to find but it was as common as Coke when I was growing up in Tennessee. People hid such things in their attics after the sixties, but now they’re collector’s items, mostly for blacks; whites would rather be caught buying porn.”
“Unbelievable,” he said, still trying to parse what he was seeing.
Cleo picked up a ceramic figurine with big lips, a codpiece, and a nose ring. “Behold the cannibal. Iconic. Comedic yet fierce. Reminds white folks that under our go-to-meetin’ clothes, blacks are savages who can’t be trusted with freedom—or white women.”
“I don’t want to see any more,” Zach said.
“One more thing,” she insisted. “I got this at a garage sale in a nice suburb.” She held out a cartoon postcard. Under the headline “Happy Thanksgiving” was the drawing of a turkey devouring a black baby.
Zach shook his head, speechless.
Cleo looked amused and annoyed at the same time. “White people forget that blacks didn’t just survive slavery, we survived this. For more than a century after emancipation, day after day, year after year, on gas stations, phone booths, tourist shops, billboards, grocery stores—we were forced to look at these images of ourselves.”
“I get it. It’s terrible. But I didn’t need the lecture and I think it’s super weird to display this noxious crap in your living room. I thought you invited me up because you felt romantic.”
“I do feel romantic,” Cleo protested, stroking his cheek. “And I want you to spend the night. But first you have to feel comfortable here.”
“Are these knickknacks supposed to put me at ease?” Zach laughed. “Not happening.”
“That’s why we need to talk first. I told you I had an unusual collection. What’d you expect? Black Barbie dolls?”
“I would have welcomed Black Barbie dolls.”
Cleo sat on the couch facing her display. “This is part of who I am, Zach.”
“This isn’t you.” He sat down and put his arm around her though, at this point, he was pretty sure the evening was over.
“This is what I came from,” she said. “It’s my genesis.”
“Showcasing these knickknacks in your home is bizarre, Cleo. You have to admit it.”
She shook her head. “To me, they’re not knickknacks, they’re evidence. Don’t forget, I’m the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Nine-tenths of power is possession. What we own can’t hurt us.”
In time, Zach would recognize her shift into lecture mode and just roll with it. On this night—his first in her apartment—he pushed back. “Oh, really? Who’s ‘we’?”
“Black lawyers, doctors, college presidents, intellectuals—that’s who collects racist memorabilia.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
Cleo shrugged off his arm, walked over to her tiny kitchen and emerged with a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses. Suddenly, she was in hostess mode.
He was confused. “Living with this crap has to be toxic.”
“Ownership is redemptive. Listen, you promised your parents and yourself that you would never look away from the horror of the Holocaust—your interests are hardly anodyne. Your refusal to forget . . . I respect that about you,” she said, her gray eyes boring into his. “Now hush your mouth and drink with me.” She set the tray on her small dining table. “The wine’s white, in your honor.”
Zach grinned. “I’ll only open it if you give me the last word on the subject.”
“Which is?”
“Yes, dear.” He pulled the cork.
“That’s more like it,” Cleo said. “Now, I’m sure you’d prefer to study my collection in greater detail, but I think it’s time to change the view. Follow me, and bring the wine.” She led him to a softly lit bedroom as serene as the living room had been jarring; nothing on its walls but a painting of a wheat field, no shelves of grim bric-a-brac, no “evidence.” The drapes were creamy white, the carpeting beige, the bed made up with satin sheets and a fluffy white comforter. She directed him to set the tray on one of the polished slabs of blond wood that extended from both sides of a platform bed built so high off the ground it required two steps to mount it. But once they were up there, glasses in hand, they had a clear view of Central Park, its velvety nightscape ribboned with serpentine paths lit by old-fashioned streetlamps.
AS THE WEEKS turned into months and he grew more enamored of Cleo, Zach marveled at the dynamics of difference—how otherness disappears with intimacy, and dissimilarity gets recast as wondrously unique.
One night, when he caught her slathering shea butter on her smooth caramel skin, Cleo said, “Black is beautiful, but it needs a helluva lot of help.”
“I think you’re perfect as is,” Zach replied, barely able to keep his hands off her. In truth he’d never had more intimate or exciting sex. She was open, affectionate, and comfortable telling him what was working. After years of wandering without a map, it felt euphoric to be with someone who could communicate her desires so freely, verbally and otherwise.
THE NEXT MORNING, after they made love again, Zach dismounted the platform and said he was going to bring her coffee in bed. Passing the living room exhibit on his way to the kitchen, it struck him suddenly that he’d been drawn to two women who collected things. The coincidence ended there, however; Bonnie’s leftist tchotchkes were an homage to idealism, Cleo’s racist doodads a perverse ode to bigotry. Bonnie’s collection was for sale in a shop, Cleo’s, a permanent display where she (and now he) ate and slept. Only a Faustian bargain would explain her choice. He filled the coffeemaker with water, inserted the paper filter, measured out the grounds. She must have made some internal deal that enabled her to leave her family behind and flourish in the New North only if she lived up close and personal with the ignominies of the Old South. While he waited for the coffee to drip into the pot, a quiet epiphany pushed through his morning haze. Hadn’t he negotiated a similar bargain with his psyche? (You get to live without survival guilt only if you tolerate an occasional vision of the NYPD transmuting into the SS.) And wasn’t there a parallel between her need to own symbols of black dehumanization and his penchant for collecting stories of Jewish suffering and working on Holocaust reparations? As much as he and Cleo had in common, there was this big difference: she was the child of another people’s trauma.
Zach carried the mugs of coffee back to the bed. She held both of them while he climbed up on the platform, then she gave him his mug and they sat back against the headboard, their legs entwined with the tangled sheets, and gazed out at another beautiful morning in Central Park.
BORN A PREACHER’S KID—a PK in Southern parlance—Cleo Scott had seen God’s hand at work when, on her first day of apartment hunting, she landed a plum rental on 103rd Street with all three rooms overlooking Central Park, which instantly became her personal country club and nature preserve, the venue where she hiked or biked its trails most weekends, played tennis in summer, went skating in winter. Cleo’s athleticism was a welcome antidote to the sports-averse women in Zach’s past—his ex-wife as well as the women he’d dated since the divorce. Babette, a poet with a map of blue veins under her papery skin and a life-threatening sun allergy; Trudy, a type A real estate executive whose outdoor leisure clothes (jog bras, running shoes, warm-up suits) belied the fact that she spent her weekends working the phones or hosting open houses for prospective clients; and the accident-prone Natalia, who twisted her ankle on the beginners’ ski slope. Not a jock in the bunch.
Not only did Cleo match Zach nearly sport for sport but, because she was a volunteer guide for the Central Park Conservancy, she knew every inch of the park’s 843 acres, which of its seventeen public restrooms stayed open in winter, the names of the guys who ran the carousel, and how many bird species flew in or over the park (275).
Her favorite destination in the park was the Shakespeare Garden, where many of the plants mentioned in the Bard’s plays and sonnets were beautifully showcased. Zach had never known the garden was there until she led him up the rocky hill between Belvedere Castle and the Swedish Cottage and introduced him to its peaceful confines. That first April, when the two of them took turns reading aloud from the Shakespearean text on the plaques at the base of each tree and bush, the garden was bursting
with hellebores and columbines, grape hyacinths and Virginia bluebells. In May, while holding hands before a budding rosebush, Cleo had recited a couplet from Romeo and Juliet.
This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flow’r when next we meet.
Zach pulled her close and kissed her, though he knew she wasn’t—couldn’t be—his fated one and, with “summer’s ripening breath,” he’d be gone.
But they were still together when the roses bloomed, together when the marsh mallows swayed in the summer breeze, when the autumn asters withered and the broom sedges shriveled, together when the warblers flew south for the winter. Each time they strolled through the Shakespeare Garden, Zach kissed Cleo to stop himself from saying the words he could not admit he felt. The one difference between them was like a craggy pothole in an otherwise smooth and scenic road, a pothole one noticed only to steer around it.
Religion and race surfaced rarely when they were first getting acquainted; Cleo told Zach about her father’s radical ministry and the role of the black church in her upbringing and Zach told Cleo how it felt to be raised by parents whose quirky amalgam of socialism and Judaism had consigned him to live in the long shadow cast by the Holocaust. One night, he confided to her the promise he had made to his mother; Cleo listened and nodded. She didn’t say much but he felt that she got him, especially the fact that, though formally irreligious, he was nevertheless utterly Jewish. It was Zach who struggled with the paradox: why he remained so committed to a faith he didn’t always feel, why he was willing to sacrifice Cleo for the sake of Jewish continuity, yet wasn’t sure what in Judaism was worth continuing. Was he really obligated to choose guilt over love?
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