“Then you’re as much a liar as he is,” I say.
“You need to get the hell out of my house,” she says.
I turn to leave, feeling a fierce and sudden hatred toward this woman, and there stands Bobby, his face contorted in grief. He clutches his arms around his body. He is crying—silently—like an orphan in a crib, like a child who has lost all hope that he might ever be picked up again.
19
The Fragments Left Over
(New York City, 1991)
A partial list of things said to me during my divorce: that I would be better off, that I would lose twenty pounds, that I would be strapped for cash, that I should “make the bastard pay,” that Cam had taken a swan dive into the pool of crazy, that I should feel happy for Cam since he is now so obviously happy, that there’s no way he and his girlfriend (now wife) are enjoying robust or vigorous or even steady sex now that there’s a baby in the picture. That that relationship certainly won’t last. That it’s time to put myself out there: to play the field, to have casual sex, to date younger men, to date older men, especially rich ones who will buy me nice things. That I will probably end up a stepmom to some man’s children, and gosh, won’t that be trying? That Cam and I always seemed like such a happy couple. That it was obvious all along that ours was a strained marriage. That Cam will be missed, because he always told such entertaining stories and was fun to have at parties. That Cam was an anchor strapped to my body, pulling me down. That I must be wondering what I did to drive him away. That I must be heartbroken. That I must be devastated. That I must not entertain the possibility that the last twenty years of my life were a waste.
Which is to say that some responses were astute, some were cruel, some were funny, and some were simply clueless. But it was Aunt Kate, of course, who provided the best analysis. Who said to me, regarding the many changes in my life, “My dear, I have no idea what your future holds, but I guarantee it will be interesting.”
My past is more interesting, too, now that I can see my “olive” skin, my curly hair, my full lips, for what they really are: a reflection not of Italian, but of African roots. Everything looks different, a twist of the kaleidoscope revealing a changed landscape: fractured, breathtaking.
• • •
When I first moved into the city I stayed with Kate and Jack for a few weeks while I looked for a place to live. While at Kate’s, I got into the habit of swimming laps at the indoor pool at the 92nd Street Y. Even though I ended up taking an apartment on the West Side, I still go to the Y nearly every day. Today, as I swim up and down my lane, alternately coming up for air and submerging my face in the water, I think of a trip I took with my girls—back when they really were girls—to visit Taffy and the Judge in Atlanta. Cam came down with us for the weekend, but returned to Connecticut that Monday, while Lucy, Mandy, and I stayed on for the week. It was summer, and it was hot, and so we remained indoors as much as possible or piled into Taffy’s diesel Mercedes wagon, air-conditioning blasting, to drive to the movies or to the pool. One day Taffy’s housekeeper brought her daughter, Jasmine, along with her to work. Jasmine and Mandy, both eight, played well together, sliding in sock-covered feet up and down the wooden hallway, brushing out the long blond hair of Mandy’s Barbies, making clay out of salt, flour, and water and smashing their palms into it, capturing their handprints. After lunch Taffy suggested we head to the Driving Club for a swim. Mandy asked if Jasmine might come, too.
“Well, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it, sweetheart?” said Taffy. “But I doubt Jasmine brought a bathing suit.”
“I’ve got an extra one,” said my girl.
A pained look crossed Taffy’s face, but then her features relaxed. Sure, she said brightly, Jasmine could come, but Mandy would need to go to the linen closet and bring down towels for us all. I didn’t say anything, but I knew the Driving Club kept a seemingly endless supply of plush white towels with blue stripes on hand, the club’s name printed on each, so that everyone who swam appeared to be in uniform as they dried off from the water. But apparently Taffy wasn’t taking us to the club that afternoon. Instead we went to the Brookwood Hills community pool, where Taffy and I lounged under umbrellas, drinking Frescas while watching the girls splash in the shallow end.
“Amelia, don’t judge,” Taffy finally said, though I had not articulated one word of critique. “That child would not have felt comfortable there. I promise, I was looking out for her more than anybody. She doesn’t need the burden of being the first black body to swim in that pool. Some reactionary old biddy might have made a scene.”
“No black person has ever swum in the PDC pool?”
“Not to my knowledge. And certainly not a maid’s daughter, I can promise you that.”
Today, as I move through the chlorinated water of this indoor, urban pool, it occurs to me that all those years ago, Lucy, Mandy, and I desegregated the Driving Club pool without even realizing it. Assuming we were the only ones there with mixed blood, inadvertently passing. Which might be assuming too much.
• • •
Daddy’s response, when I finally reached him in Palo Alto to tell him of my newfound knowledge of our family history:
“Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not as good as they are.”
“No one is telling me that,” I said.
“Well, no one has to know if you don’t want them to.”
A pause, while I took slow and deliberate breaths, trying to shrink the lump of anxiety that had swollen in my throat.
“Daddy, I want people to know. I want to be known fully.”
“Well, sweetheart, you’re braver than me.”
“It was a different time,” I said. “I have no way of understanding what you were going through.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for acknowledging that.”
We were both quiet for a minute.
“Were you always scared? Of getting caught? Being exposed?”
“I didn’t allow myself to give it much thought. I concentrated on my work, my lab. I concentrated on genetic code, patterns beneath the surface. I’m no idiot, Amelia. I see the connection between my work and what I did to be able to pursue it. But I suppose somewhere along the way I decided that it would be easiest to live my life on my own terms if I weren’t first and foremost defined by the color of my skin. Frankly, I was right.”
“But you left everything. Everybody.”
“I’ll tell you something. Last year I was given a huge award, arguably the most prestigious one in the field of genetic research. And at the banquet honoring me, just before I gave my speech and accepted my check, I thought to myself, And all it cost was everything.”
• • •
A week after she kicked me out, Alice invited me back to the apartment she and Bobby Banks share. We sat down at their dining room table, all very solemn. Bobby served hot tea and put out a little pot of Alice’s lemon curd and a plate of homemade ginger snaps to spread it on. Alice made it very clear that she was reaching out to me for Bobby’s sake and not her own. That Bobby was like a stubborn dog that got ahold of a chew toy and would not let it go. That it was Bobby who insisted she not look away from the truth of her brother’s life. That it was Bobby who shamed her for saying she could not accept that I was her kin.
“I told her,” Bobby clarified, “that if she refused to accept the truth of who you are, then she’s as limited as my mama.”
“He scolded me is what he did,” said Alice, looking at Bobby with fond annoyance. “Thirty-year-old man scolding an old woman. Lord. What I put up with from that child.”
The two of them exchanged a look. I could see the nights of hard conversations behind their locked eyes.
While Alice has come to accept me, albeit grudgingly at first, she has no space in her heart for my father. Alice only speaks of Daddy in the past, as if she is speaking of a dead man. She does not want to contact him, does not want to know what became of his life after he married my mother and had me. I think o
f Kate and Alice working so closely together on Homegrown, and all that time Alice never knew that on the weekends when Kate went to Connecticut to visit her sister and brother-in-law, she was visiting James.
“How could you not tell her?” I asked Kate the night I found out the truth about my father, the night Alice kicked me out of her apartment. I was ready to raise hell with my aunt for withholding so very much from me. Kate said that she had tried to broach the subject with Alice, right after Kate found out my father’s secret herself, just before Homegrown was published. But Alice turned icy at the mention of her brother. Said he had died a long time ago, said she intended to let the dead rest in peace. Reminded Kate that they had agreed that Homegrown would not delve into anything personal, would remain a cookbook and not a memoir, documenting recipes, not lives. Told Kate that in order for the two of them to continue working together, they needed to keep their own relationship strictly professional.
“What could I do but respect her wishes?” asked Kate.
While disinterested in Daddy’s life once he eviscerated his black roots, Alice is willing to stretch back in time, to tell of her memories of him from when they were kids, to tell of the mind-reading game she and James used to play, sitting across from each other, one spelling out a word on a chalkboard, the other drawing a picture of that word without ever having seen it written down. She tells me of the night she and James found the lynched body in the woods, which was the same night they learned the truth about their roots, that their great-grandfather was a white man.
Alice says that for a while after Daddy left Emancipation Township she had a sense of him, that he was alive, that he was safe, and that he was lonely. And then she lost him, abruptly, as if he had deliberately cut off the signal. Months later, Alice’s mother received a letter with no return address. It was from James. It said everyone should forget about him, should pretend James Stone had never been born.
Impossible. At sixteen, still yearning, Alice headed to Manhattan in hopes of finding her brother, even though many of her cousins had moved to D.C., where they had settled in quickly with relatives who had learned to live off the farm. (Emancipation Township did not survive the Depression. After their grandfather died, after the land was liened because of the overdue tax bill, after yet another year of bad crops, everyone left, scattered to crowded cities, where they lived in apartment buildings, where their feet no longer touched the warm, fertile ground.) In New York, Alice was always on the lookout for James. She was most alert at jazz clubs, in Harlem, at services at Abyssinian Baptist, which she attended not because of any strong religious convictions but because she thought James might show up there.
And then years later, after the soldiers returned home victorious from the Second World War, but before she and Gus opened the café, she saw James, in Manhattan, walking down Fifth Avenue, hand in hand with a pretty, pregnant white woman. Alice was in the middle of helping Gus decorate a store window at Saks, but upon seeing James she walked off the job, told Gus an emergency had come up and that she had to go. She followed Daddy down the street, calling after him, “James! James! It’s Alice. Turn around.”
He did not turn, but instead walked faster. She, too, picked up her pace. At the next intersection, where James and the pregnant white woman were stopped at a light, Alice caught up with her brother. Tugged at the cuff of his sleeve. He gave her a withering look, still refusing to speak. “If I’d have died on the spot he would have been glad,” Alice said.
Alice, wounded and in shock, slunk away. Told herself she was mistaken, that the man she saw walking down Fifth Avenue, hand in hand with a pregnant white woman, was not her brother. Told herself her brother had died a long time ago. Started mixing up the face of the lynched boy she had seen as a girl with the face of her brother. Told herself James was lynched. At first she knew she was making up a story, relying on an untruth to help her move past the pain of her brother’s rejection. But eventually she told herself the story of her brother’s lynching so many times that she came to believe it as fact. Eventually she came to believe her own lie.
When Alice told me this, I sympathized. Born into the lie of Daddy’s fictitious heritage, I continued the family tradition, building my hearth and home around untruths—that Cam and I were happy together, for one—until Cam finally struck a match and burned it all down. I am at a place now where I can say thank God. Thank God it burned to the ground.
I am even beginning to feel grateful Cam left. We both needed out. Our lives have irrevocably split, two vines twisted around our girls, but otherwise growing in opposite directions. I have no claim on his life from this point on, but neither do I feel malice.
• • •
Bobby and Alice and I did not linger around the table for too long, talking solemnly. Bobby had a cookbook to put out, and Alice and I helped him test the recipes, to make sure they translated well from restaurant to home kitchen. We did a good job, the essays he wrote to accompany the recipes were dear, and we had a lovely little launch party for it at the café, which Gus decided should double as his farewell party, saying he was tired of being a restaurateur and was ready to close shop.
“It’s time for my second act,” Gus said, this from an octogenarian. But he made good on his declaration, shutting the restaurant down permanently the week after the launch and purchasing around-the-world airline tickets for himself, Randy, and a young male companion who, Gus said, would be there “to help with the luggage.”
The imminent closing of the restaurant certainly made for a teary book launch. Teary and boozy, with everyone concerned about what Bobby would do once the restaurant closed. Bobby assured us that he would be fine, that he was talking to several people about starting his own place, but that he might take some time off before he did, that he needed to figure out if being a chef was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Both of my daughters came to the launch, and Kate and Jack and many others from PML, along with my best friend from boarding school, Sarah. And a whole slew of café regulars, including a group of formidable ladies who lunched back in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s who wore their antiquated—and yellowing—white gloves to wave farewell to their memories of a more elegant time, long since passed but revived for that night. Martinis and Champagne were passed, along with a selection of Bobby’s best hors d’oeuvres: potato pillows dotted with crème fraîche and caviar, crawfish spread served in toast cups, miniature crab cakes topped with rémoulade, tiny tuna burgers with fresh grated ginger, served on homemade brioche (Alice’s recipe, which I discovered was virtually indistinguishable from what my father used to bake for our family). There were all sorts of desserts, too, mostly southern. But the hit of the evening was, as always, Bobby’s banana pudding, made with pound cake instead of Nilla wafers. For the party Bobby fixed individual puddings, served in shot glasses, topped with whipped cream instead of meringue.
The evening had the feel of wedding receptions Cam and I used to attend in the South, back in our twenties, when everyone was getting married and it seemed every other weekend involved a flight down to Atlanta. At those southern receptions, buffets were favored over seated dinners so the guests could mingle. There was lots of mingling at the launch party, plenty of air kisses and bellowing laughter and exclamations of, “My God, it’s been ages!” All the while Alice sat like a queen at the far corner table, watched over by one of Gus’s alabaster statues while she sipped from a flute of Champagne, observing. I could not read Alice’s facial expression, and concerned that she was feeling left out, I went to sit with her. But as soon as I got to her table she flashed me one of her radiant smiles.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” she said. “Takes me back to when I cooked here as a young woman. I used to peek through the kitchen door just to watch the expressions on the customers’ faces as they ate my food. Taking delight in their delight.”
And then Alice grabbed my forearm, squeezing it as she directed my gaze to a couple just walking in, looking distinctly out of place.
It wasn’t their style so much as their innocence, a sort of wide-eyed blinkiness, docile as cows in a roomful of foxes. The woman was small boned and petite. In style and physical features she reminded me of none other than Nancy Reagan. She wore a bright red jacket with gold buttons atop a black crepe-wool skirt, black tights, and little black patent-leather loafers, a hard plastic bow decorating each toe. Her hair was short and curly, her blue eyes so bright and twinkly I noticed them from across the restaurant. Beside her was a tall, broad-shouldered man with snowy white hair, wearing a blue blazer, also with brass buttons. Bobby was over by the bar, laughing at something with Kate. Alice and I watched as his eyes darted and he noticed the couple. His laughing mouth froze in place so it looked as if he were making an “O.” And suddenly I knew what Alice had already recognized. Bobby’s parents had arrived.
Bobby stood and walked to them and I could tell that he was holding himself back from running. I could see the little boy inside him just dying to fling himself upon these people. But instead he was measured, polite. I watched as he shook his father’s hand; I watched as he bent down to kiss his mother’s rouged cheek. She gave the side of his face a pat.
“Well it’s about damn time,” said Alice. “Though I hate that it took a good book review in the New York Times to get those two to show up for Bobby.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe they would have come anyway. It’s not the first good review the Times has bestowed upon him. Maybe they are finally ready.”
“Maybe,” said Alice.
• • •
And what of myself, a recently divorced woman who discovered at age forty-four that her father was a black man (mixed, actually) passing as white? I think it is fair to say that I no longer have a clear sense of who I am. I think it is fair to say that I have become more interested in observing the world, rather than judging it. I have a lemon-yellow 8-speed bike, an “apartment-warming” present from Bobby, given to me when I first moved into the city, after my divorce was finalized and the Connecticut house had been sold. Weather willing, most days after work I bike the trails through Central Park, just for the fun of it. (A woman my age, biking just for fun.) When I cross town to go swim at the Y or eat dinner with Aunt Kate and Jack, I usually bike there, too. I like passing through the city this way. It’s faster than walking but still close to the ground, which is more and more where I feel at home these days.
A Place at the Table: A Novel Page 27