“So, Glo Girard is your mother,” Esme whooped, the I-told-you-so unspoken but strongly implied. “You know, it's a little after noon in London. A perfect time to make that call.”
“For what reason? Esme, the woman wanted nothing to do with me my entire life. Why start now?”
“When people are dying they always want to get stuff off their chests. You know, clear their conscience before they do the heavenly meet-and-greet.”
“My father certainly didn't,” I angrily interjected. “Look, it's pretty obvious that I was the property settlement in their divorce. He got me and she got the chance to live her dream. Out of sight, out of mind. Everybody's happy.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There could be a million different reasons why your mom never contacted you. Maybe she thought you were dead . . .”
“Maybe she just didn't want me and my father was trying to protect me,” I interrupted, the sudden thought mellowing my fury.
“Maybe. But the only person who knows the truth can't tell you unless you contact her.”
“I don't know,” I replied, picking up the amber rosary from the nightstand and sliding the beads between my fingers.
“Well, then think about this. That article said that Glo named both her children after angels. Sera, you have family out there. If for no other reason, let her hook you up before it's too late.”
We talked a few minutes more, but after Esme's comment about siblings nothing really penetrated my brain. My mind was consumed with the notion that with Clinton's apparent defection, I was teetering on the edge of total abandonment. It took another twenty minutes for the Advil to kick in, but once I could hold my head upright I booted up my computer and found the Web site for the hospital mentioned on television. Along with the phone number, I learned that the Royal Marsden Hospital had a worldwide reputation for cancer care and research. Another mystery revealed.
Even though she was a stranger, the thought of Glodelle dying of cancer in a foreign hospital depressed me. Was she in pain? Was she alone or surrounded by family and friends? Was my brother or sister with her? Was she thinking of me as she slowly slipped away? That thought caused my tears to flow, both from anger and concern. Defiantly I picked up the phone, deciding that if I wasn't on her mind, I would be.
I swear I could hear my heart beating as I dialed the number. When the operator answered I asked to be connected with Glo's room. In a clipped British accent she informed me that Ms. Girard was in a private room accessible only to family. I bit my lip and took a deep breath before giving my name and demanding that I be connected to my mother's room. I'm not sure where that audacity came from, but it worked, because within seconds she was transferring my call.
I considered hanging up at least a thousand times in the short span it took for my call to be connected. But my mind was too consumed with anxious queries to command my hands to act. Who would pick up the phone and would they believe my claim of relativity when I barely believed it myself?
“Hello.” A female voice with no discernible accent answered.
“Uh . . . this is . . . um . . . Seraphim Taylor,” I began, wondering if I could be related to the voice on the phone. “I'd like to speak to . . .”
“Who did you say you are?” My ears registered a mix of caution and disbelief.
“Seraphim Taylor. I live in America and I have reason to believe . . .”
“Oh my God. Phimie is it really you? How did you know? Where are you?” The woman's questions flew like bullets from an AK-47.
Phimie. The sound of that particular diminutive made me sit up straight. My father hated that nickname. He preferred the use of my full name, barely tolerated the use of Sera by my friends and teachers, and had always refused to allow anyone to call me was Phimie. Was it because my mother had used this name? My skin pimpled by the realization that the person on the phone knew of my existence. “Who is this?”
“This is Mame Anderson. I'm your mother's lawyer, and if you're Seraphim Nicole Taylor, daughter of Michael Taylor, born April 27, 1970, then you're her daughter.”
“Then it's true. I am her daughter. How do you know me?”
“I've been helping Glo put her affairs in order.”
“Then she's mentioned me?” My words were barely audible, even to me.
“Yes. We've actually been trying to contact you, but the last known address we have for you is Atlanta, Georgia.”
“I live in New Jersey now.” As I explained to Mame how and when I'd learned of Glo's existence, my mind raced ahead. My mother wanted to see me. She had tried to contact me. This realization, while doing little to erase my feelings of betrayal, seemed to take the hard edge off her lifelong denial. “Why did she wait so long to find me?”
“Glo alluded to the fact that she was estranged from both you and your brother, but I really don't have any further details.”
I had a brother. Damn. Forget pouring rain. I was standing in the midst of a monsoon. Still, the confirmation of this fact delighted me. Suddenly alone didn't feel quite so lonely. “Is he there with you?”
“No, unfortunately we've been unable to locate him as well. Perhaps we'll get lucky and he'll see the news before it's too . . .”
“How bad is she?” I interrupted, hoping for a miraculous denial of the truth.
“It won't be long now. I'm afraid your mother has lymphatic cancer. She hasn't been conscious in days but the doctors are doing everything to keep her comfortable.”
“I'd like to see her.” My mouth released the words without contacting my mind for permission. But once airborne, retrieval was impossible.
“I'm sure she'd like that. But come immediately. There isn't much time.”
I hung up the phone, my head a whirling blend of varying sentiments—curiosity and confusion reigned. What was I going to do? In less than twenty-four hours I'd located my mother, but unfortunately on the lost side of found. What was the point of flying thousands of miles to say good-bye to an unconscious woman whom I wouldn't recognize if she sat down next to me? Why, when she wasn't capable of answering the questions that I most wanted to know, like why had she and my father conspired against me and why had it been so easy to give up her only daughter?
The answers to those questions would die with her and there was nothing I could do about it. And just as potent was my regret over the lost opportunity to know if the adage “like mother like daughter” applied to Glodelle and me. Certainly, Glo Girard exceeded all of my childhood fantasies of what my mother had been like. She was dynamic, talented, fascinating, and famous—all the things I wished I could be. But perhaps if I went to her, held her hand, and looked into her face, some Glo would rub off. Maybe in London I'd find the piece of my mother that was me.
Those maybes convinced me to phone my travel agent and book a flight to London that evening. I hung up and immediately called Clinton to fill him in and let him know of my plans, but of course, he was unavailable. All the better, I decided. I'd simply leave town and let him wonder about me and my intentions for a change. I left a message for Esme on her cell phone, knowing she'd applaud my decision and zealously pump me for every detail when I returned.
I was busy packing when the phone rang. The connection had that long-distance crackle to it. I knew immediately it was Mame Anderson from London with bad news.
“Phimie, I'm sorry, but your mother died about an hour ago.”
My eyes filled with tears as I realized what I had gained and lost in the span of a day. I was once again officially an orphan, but now I had a brother and a solid link to my past. I took a minute to allow my grief and disappointment to make room for gratitude, then told Mame I would be arriving in the morning to help with the funeral arrangements.
I walked over to the mirror and once again placed my head between the suspended photos of my parents. “Take care of her, Daddy,” I requested, wiping away my tears. I smiled at my reflection, intuitively knowing the search for my mother had just begun.
FROM These Same Long Bones
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BY GWENDOLYN M. PARKER
As if he'd been shaken, Sirus McDougald abruptly opened his eyes. There was a merciful moment of forgetfulness. The sheet was tangled about his long legs. He lay for a second at the center of a haze, moist and open from sleep, his limbs relaxed and peaceful, the recollection of a smile still puddled at the corner of his full lips. It was near dawn, and Sirus had been dreaming. He had dreamed that nothing would ever awaken him again. He had dreamed that he could stop life at his bedroom door. He had dreamed that he could force time to retrace its steps. But even as he turned to avoid it, the sun stole into his room, creeping into his sleep.
Sirus rubbed a broad hand across his face and looked drowsily around him. The dust in a beam of light that streamed through the blinds sparkled like fireflies near his slippers. Next to his head, on the small folding table he used as his nightstand, the light caressed the items he had laid out the night before: a small tortoiseshell comb, his pocket watch, his mother-of-pearl studs edged in gold, the loose pieces of paper on which he'd absently scribbled as he spoke to the reporter from the local paper. The light seemed to halt on the words on the top sheet of paper—“Brown, brown, 5´3″, reading.” What could the reporter he'd spoken to yesterday possibly print that would be news?
At once, Sirus's lingering ease was gone. His eyes widened, his chest swelled with air, and his mouth opened, gaping. He seized the piece of paper from the table, crumpled it, and stuffed it into his mouth.
A moan escaped. His daughter, his precious girl, his only child, was dead. Of what importance was the color of her hair and eyes, her height or favorite hobby, when even the paper boy knew more than that: Knew that she liked to sit in the narrow tunnel made by the honeysuckles between their house and the Senates', knew how she banged out of the house with her skates already on, how she stopped on the grass at the edge of the walk to tighten them, knew the way she posed to wave good-bye, one hand on her hip, the other straight in the air, an elongated little teapot.
No, there was no news to convey, talking to the reporter was just a formality, one among dozens that were expected of him. So he rented all ten of Jason's cars for the funeral and he called people personally with the news, and he readied his house as if for a party. These were the things that were done, and he did each of them, when it was time, in turn. He knew that his neighbors and friends were similarly busy: the women baking pies and hams and fretting over who might not know and still need to be told; the men collecting money, arranging for their own transportation and clean black suits; even the children, bent over basement tables, cutting construction paper to serve as backings for paper flowers and poems.
Sirus forced his legs stiffly to the edge of the bed. Get up, he said to himself, spitting the paper onto the floor.
Outside, cars slowly traveled past his house. Some carried strangers: a Northerner in search of a relative's home, vacationers from farther inland heading for the coast, a delivery truck with vats of sweet cola syrup. But most carried Sirus's friends and acquaintances, unable to resist taking an extra turn past his house in an attempt to catch a glimpse of him or to see the large black and purple wreath hung on the door.
How was he holding up? Why was his wife, Aileen, sleeping over at her mother's house? Had they, following the country way, covered the mirrors with black paper? Like Sirus, the people who had settled this part of town—the colored section, which butted up against the white part of town and then turned back on itself—were primarily the descendants and relatives of farmers. As they'd spread throughout the city, one brother and then one cousin following the next, they'd left the country but brought their country ways: an unflagging belief in cause and effect—after all, hadn't they always reaped what they sowed—leavened by a large measure of fatalism bred by bugs, fire, and a too hot sun, and bound together by clannishness based on proximity, shared cheekbones, and common values. For these farmers and their progeny, holding the line against the sorrow of history, there was absolute virtue in hard work, an education was a lifeline, and life was an inevitable mystery. These things were givens, like the choice of good land, from which everything else that was good would proceed. And to these descendants of farmers, death itself was both sower and reaper, an unreasoning though sometimes benevolent messenger from God.
Sirus himself was born on a farm that produced three hundred baskets of tobacco a season, in a town called Carr, in the upper coastal plain of North Carolina. It was a typical pocket of life in the South, crammed with contradictions and ellipses of time. There were the Cherokee and the Tuscarora, who had lived on the land for always; the slave and the free Africans who'd settled beside them; and the Scottish farmers, who had worked beside the others. Sirus's parents, like those of his neighbors, were descended from these Africans, Cherokee, Tuscarora, and Scots, and these people, when they were not farmers, were blacksmiths, barbers, cabinetmakers, grocers, and traders. They built everything they would have one day from these skills. And Sirus absorbed in his greens and hog crackling and corn bread the peculiar mixture of building and dreaming that was the heritage of these people. Now, in the wake of death, he was as much a part of this town of some five thousand colored people as the red dirt that ringed the manicured lawns, or the North Carolina light that was at once bright and hazy, or the ash, willow, cedar, and pecan that were native to the land.
Sirus stood now, some thirty-five years past his birth, in the late summer of 1947, in this town of Durham, North Carolina, which bustled with progress, in a house on Fayetville Street that was one of dozens he'd built, wishing he were the one who was dead. From his bathroom, the sun streaming in the window, Sirus could still hear the cars as they slowed to pass his house. He stood his shaving brush on its base, bristles up, to dry, and carefully shook the last drops of water from his razor. He looked at his face, now clean-shaven, in the mirror.
There was still the familiar broad chin, the wide cheekbones, the long thick nose, the thick black hair that formed a sharp contrast to his unbearably light, almost pearl-toned skin. The cold water had restored some color to his face; his gray eyes were smooth and clear. He marveled at his own composure. How could his features reveal so little while he felt as if every aspect of him, every thought and desire, every feeling and habit, was hurtling inside him at such speed and with such force that he could be an atom exploding, shattering into oblivion?
From the moment he had learned of Mattie's death, from each second that moved forward, he was dragged backward, caught in a great rush of time away from the present, away from the husband he'd been, the prosperous businessman the town had grown to rely on, the solid friend that so many came to for advice. And in his place loomed the specter of another Sirus, a youth, a boy he believed was long gone, a boy who was all quiet and softness. This boy, his eyes permanently wide, followed after him in his own house, relentlessly padded after him in his own shoes.
There had been nothing authoritative about Sirus as a child. He had been thin and too pale, his elbows always at the wrong angles, his energy too volatile, kinetic, as likely to lead him in one direction as another. But as the years went by his skin had gained a translucence and his energy had cohered, coalesced, so that it no longer erupted jerkily in his limbs but rode high in his chest, girded by his thickening muscles. As a man, he was loose-gaited, solid but warm. If he wanted to command attention, he had only to stand, releasing heat into the air like fire.
He dropped his gaze from the mirror to the basin and watched the spot where the water continued to run. A small green stain glinted at the bottom of the bowl. On any other day it was just green, a color, but today it summoned half a dozen memories: the color of new tobacco in the fields, the color of his mother's eyes when she stood in the light on their porch, the transparent color of an old penny, or the color, in spring, of all the land of his youth. The color, this green, came rushing up at him with its freshness and longing, setting off an embedded charge. Sirus doubled over, an intense wave of pain and nausea gripping his gut. He grabbed th
e sink, shaking.
Tears welled up and just as quickly receded. With careful steps he returned to the bedroom, took a clean shirt from his wardrobe, and slid his arms into the cool, crisp cotton. Then, slowly, he walked to the window. The starch in his collar was exactly as he'd requested, but now it felt like a gag. He watched the cars continue in an endless procession out on the street, until a black limousine appeared. It was Etta Baldridge's car, turning onto Fayetville from Dupree, already bearing down the road with that ominous cadence reminiscent of halting steps stumbling toward death. If its headlights had been on, it would have looked as if it were already part of the funeral procession.
As the car crept down the street, Sirus could easily imagine Etta's voice and her short, sharp fingers tapping on the back of the front seat right below her driver's neck. “Albert, Albert, slower,” she'd be saying. From where Sirus stood at the window he could imagine Etta's head, peeping forward from the relative darkness of the back of the car, her mouth moving animatedly, her face nearly pressed against the window. “Albert.” Etta had been the first person to call on him when he had moved into this house. “I'm Etta Baldridge. Welcome to Fayetville,” she'd said, pressing her face against the inside screen at the front door, an unofficial welcoming committee. Etta was always one to be pressing.
He thought he heard his housekeeper's key in the lock downstairs. Thank God, he thought. Mrs. Johnson could talk with Etta if she insisted on stopping. He reached for his pants from his wardrobe and his suspenders from the back of the cane-bottomed chair by the window. He knew that if he went out to the porch, Etta would ask Albert to stop altogether, would wave her arms and hands frenetically until he came out to the car. Once he was there, she would clasp him with those same grasping hands, her eyes sweeping greedily over him, hunting for a stain on his shirt, a cut from shaving, some food left on his lips, some sign of his grief—anything she could carry away with her to the bank or the insurance office or the beauty parlor where she would find an ear in which to deposit her find. If Etta saw him at this moment she might also be able to spy the child who was hiding in his face. He reached for his suit jacket, feeling a wave of relief as the car passed.
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