Claudie turned in a rage. “Now, girl. Is that enough? Her father was white. A white boy. Is that enough? Enough to know?”
“I think so.”
“Good. She stays inside. The black people don’t want her, and the white people won’t have her, even to scrub their floors. You’re the last person on God’s earth to figure this out.”
“Why Evelyn Hope?”
“I just liked the sound. Like music. Evelyn Hope. She sits in her room all day. She listens to the radio. She smokes cigarettes. She hasn’t been out of the house since she was five.”
“And how old is Evelyn now? Evelyn Hope.” She saw the look, quick as a match striking, felt the needle prick her hip.
“She is nineteen years old.”
“So you’re . . .”
“Older than Jesus was when he died.”
“It’s hard to tell.”
“Most folks around here, they know how old I am to the minute. People round here just know too damned much. They been watching us, you and me. If we go to them movies, they just be watching us harder.”
“If you think I care, you’re wrong.”
“That’s because you’re rich. And you’re white. You don’t have to care.”
“But we’re friends.”
“Yes, we are. We are friends. In this room. At this minute.”
“I don’t have any other friends. Not one.”
Sylvan didn’t speak for a long time, then she repeated, “Well, I do. I do have one friend.”
Claudie adjusted the tucks at the hip. She looked out at the window, didn’t even flinch when Claudie pricked her again with a needle. She wondered if Claudie had heard her.
“Yes. Yes I do. I have somebody.”
“That make you happy?”
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever known that made me happy. The only thing that’s ever belonged to me. Person. Him, I mean. I love him, I do, and the only way I can show it is to not say one word about him, ever. That’s what he said. Understand, Claudie? Nobody.”
Claudie nodded.
“But he’s not, you know, he’s not a friend. That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. So why don’t you be with him?”
“I’m married.”
“Get unmarried. White people can do that.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It never is.”
“It is in the movies. Things just happen. It’s divine. Go to the movies with me.”
And one day they did. Claudie Wiley was the first black woman in Brownsburg to ride in the front seat of a car being driven by a white woman. People, knowing what they already knew and didn’t talk about, figured riding with Claudie right beside her was just another example of the hillbilly girl’s recklessness, and they knew that when Boaty heard about it, he’d be madder about this than he would be about the other.
The movie was called On the Town, and it was about three sailors who had only one day to see New York City and find true love. Sylvan paid for two tickets, but then she and Claudie had to go in different doors to get to the movie theater, and Claudie had to sit upstairs in the balcony, the only person up there, a black woman alone in the dark in the middle of the afternoon. And there was all of New York, in Technicolor, spread out before her, a city she might have seen or even lived in, once upon a time. She wondered why she would want to sit in the dark alone and watch a bunch of white people singing and dancing and kissing in a big town she would never ever see, and she scanned the silvery screen for one single black face and there wasn’t one, not a single solitary one, except way in the background.
She sat, with her sketch pad, and she drew the clothes the women wore, the lines quick and deft. She knew exactly which dress Sylvan would want, as soon as she saw it, and then she saw more of it, what it did, how it moved as some woman tap-danced through a museum in it, and she drew faster, capturing every detail, until she was practically sewing it right there in the movies, feeling the cloth in her hands, almost, and the swirl of the skirt floating around the legs of the beautiful Southern girl sitting downstairs with the white people. Not for her, no, never for her, these things, and certainly not for Evelyn Hope, although Claudie did sometimes make party clothes for both of them, things out of Vogue. She would make one dress for herself, a fancy ball gown of intricate structure and drape, and an identical one for Evelyn Hope, and even a tiny one just as rich and fine for Eveleyn Hope’s doll baby, a little white thing she carried with her everywhere, the fine blonde curls of the doll’s hair now a rat’s nest of carelessness and age. They wore these dresses at night when she made a roast and a cake for herself and her daughter, dressed like princesses in the tumultuous dark maw of her house, by candlelight, the mice scurrying in the cupboards as they ate stringy lamb and rich chocolate cake. Party clothes, clothes that had nothing to do with their real lives, so that her decrepit house was turned into a kind of palace.
But this dress in the movie, this green dress, she knew without even asking that it was for Sylvan. She even heard Sylvan call out once, during the movie, “Claudie?” and she knew, she knew that she would be making it for her.
It was kelly green, tight in the body and full in the skirt, with buttons from the hem to the collar, a collar that was rolled, and made of a black-and-white tartan silk, all of it silk, and fine. But it was when the woman in the dress moved and started dancing that they both, upstairs and down, saw the magic of the dress. As Ann Miller danced, the dress unbuttoned by degrees, and they saw, both of them, that the dress was lined in the same black-and-white tartan as the collar, the portrait collar that showed off her beautiful collarbones and neck, and set her rather vulgar face aglow with a smile that women had only in the movies.
That’s when Sylvan called Claudie’s name: when the dress came undone and the lining swirled into the air around the woman’s thighs. Silk like a bird’s wings, fluttering at her hips, her frantic legs, the skirt graceful and green and billowing with flashes of black and white, all elegant, all moving, in motion. It was the fact that the dress—what made it special—only revealed itself after the initial effect had come and gone that excited both of them, as though the dress held a secret, and only told the secret when the time came. Like their hearts: the two women, both of them, not telling much of what both knew, holding back, keeping still even as they flew through their lives. Sylvan had a lover. Claudie had a daughter, upstairs in that mess, upstairs forever, and little was said and much was accepted as being true.
The sailors and their girls got into all kinds of escapades, and there was kissing and more singing and dancing. But nothing really mattered after the green dress. Even Frank Sinatra, with his boyish charm, or Gene Kelly, with his strong legs and the sexy scar on his cheek, did little to excite their hearts, flush with excitement upstairs and down at the prospect of making that dress for Sylvan to wear.
Sylvan didn’t want to kiss any of those men, and she didn’t want to dance with them or by herself, and she didn’t want to be any of those women. She just wanted the feel of the swirling silk against the skin of her body, and she wanted the daring leg and the pure float of the thing as she twirled, in private, for Charlie Beale, maybe in the woods, barefooted on the spring moss, her dress greener than anything in the forest around her, greener than the newest and lightest leaf.
They went straight from the theater to the one small department store. They didn’t stop to eat anything, since there was only the one place, and they couldn’t walk in there together, anyway, and even in the store, they pretended that they didn’t know each other, just walked through the aisles of material, looking only for the silk they wanted and the tartan that made the whole thing work. They didn’t find the exact thing, but, through gestures and glances, they found things that would work, that would do, and they chose these, and Claudie stood by the door while the salesgirl cut the cloth and wrapped the two pieces of material in brown paper bundles and Sylvan paid with money from her pocketbook. They walked out onto the st
reet where it was still daylight and drove back to Brownsburg in the big Buick, happy in their day and the company they had kept, not talking at all until Sylvan finally said, as they pulled into the outskirts of the town, “See, Claudie? Wasn’t it wonderful? That’s the movies.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE BOY WAS always with them. The boy and the dog. They began to forget he was there, forgot to keep an eye how far or near or needy he was, and sometimes, when they made love outdoors, they could feel the boy and the dog in the woods, circling them, catching their scent, their sounds, but they were so lost, so gone, they couldn’t take the time to think about that.
They weren’t bad people. Charlie wasn’t lewd, and she’d been raised up in the country, in a natural kind of way, with natural manners and grace and a sense of what’s right. And Charlie loved the boy. He sometimes thought he was the boy’s father. He knew he shouldn’t think that way, that it was a mistake, bad for him, and bad for the boy, who shouldn’t, at his age, have been asked to bear the weight of that kind of confusion.
And he knew that, often, when they were running together in the fields, chasing that dog, or sleeping out in the open, doing the things that Will was too old to do, he knew that Sam sometimes forgot that Charlie wasn’t his father. Sam himself never forgot where his true home, where his true his heart lay. The infinite and inexorable pull of blood. But, with Charlie Beale, he felt paid attention to, watched and guarded, even as he was given the freedom to be, never scolded, never made to sit up straight, or to hold his fork in the way his mother said polite people did.
Sam still didn’t know what Charlie and Sylvan were doing when they lay down together, glimpsed through a window or through the branches of a pine tree, but he knew it was something, and it stirred his heart and his body in ways he couldn’t explain to himself.
Sylvan was full where his mother was spare. Her lips a full slash of crimson, high, hot summer, whereas his mother’s palette was more mute, more like winter. Still, it was Sylvan who seemed to bring a chill to him, where his mother brought warmth.
When his mother’s warmth left him at night, after they had said his prayers and the light had been turned off and the wind was rustling in the trees outside his window, pitch black, it was Sylvan’s chill that crept into the sheets and kept him from sleep.
He lay, between sleep and waking, and he would think about all the questions he wanted to ask Charlie, things he noticed in the world, things that struck him as strange, or funny, words he had heard that meant something specific to everybody but him, or just things a boy his age would never in a million years know the answer to; things he knew his father was too busy or too tired to answer. Charlie was never tired. And he knew the answer to everything.
They would lie in the grass in the evening, out by the river, without her, just Charlie and Sam and Jackie Robinson, and the questions would come back to him, and Charlie always knew exactly what to say.
“Beebo?”
“What, son?”
“I’ve been thinking. Sometimes the moon is really, really big, and sometimes it’s little. Why does that happen?”
They watched the moon rising over the river, huge, bigger than an orange in the palm of your hand. Charlie smoked a cigarette while he took a minute to think about it, and stared at the sky, as though he hadn’t even heard him. Charlie could blow smoke rings, and Sam knew that, when he was old enough, he’d blow smoke rings, too, just the same way, and that Charlie would teach him how.
“Sam? Have you ever been to a party? A birthday party?”
“Once.”
“What did they have there?”
“Cake!”
“What else?”
“Presents. And balloons.”
“Thought so. Well, the moon is like a balloon. It starts off little, and then somebody blows into it, and it gets really, really big, and then it pops, yours popped didn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“So then somebody gets another balloon and blows it up again.”
“Who?”
“Promise you won’t tell anybody?”
“Promise.” He made a cross over his heart.
“I do.”
Sam didn’t laugh right away, not until he knew Charlie was teasing. Then he pounded Charlie’s chest, as Charlie pulled his head down and tugged on his hair and they rolled over and over in the twilight field, stubble in their backs, Jackie nipping and yapping at their heels.
He believed whatever he was told. He was tired of not knowing. He could read already, he had learned in secret just from watching the words on the page as his mother read to him, he could read the funny books by himself, almost. He didn’t see any reason to go to school, as he was supposed to do in the fall, but he was tired of not knowing so many things.
Somehow, in the dark, as he listed and memorized the things he wanted to ask Charlie the next time he saw him, all the questions became one single question, a question he knew he would never ask and never get the answer to: What was it they were doing when they took their clothes off? Why was it a secret? Why did they pretend, when he was back with them and they had their clothes on again, why did they pretend that it had never happened?
It made Sam feel alone in a way he had never felt alone before. In fact, he had never quite known what solitude was, he had never felt it, until the first time he saw them walking out of the door in Boaty Glass’s house, when they stood in the kitchen and acted as though nothing had happened. While he had been looking at funny books, they had turned into different people, and he knew somehow that the people they had turned into were what he would turn into, as well, once something happened. He didn’t know what that something was, he didn’t know how long it would take, he just knew that it would happen, and it made him sad, because he suddenly felt as though anything that happened between now and then wasn’t any more important than the silly pictures of ducks in pirate outfits he had been looking at.
He grew suddenly aware of the body he lived in, knowing that it would change in time into something else. He hoped it would change into something like the body Charlie wore, lean, muscular, smooth, not tall, instead of something like his father’s. A body like Will’s seemed too heavy for him to inhabit, too much to carry around.
His father was all warm rounds and folds; Charlie was like a wooden table, all flat surfaces.
Sam grew not just aware of his body, he also became afraid of it. It seemed so fragile to him, so small, so transitory. Things went on inside it he didn’t understand. Things moved in him. He heard noises, the noises of his body working, a tiny train running smooth on flat track. He didn’t know how these things happened. He didn’t even know what were the right questions to ask, and he didn’t know who to ask. Not his mother. Not his father. And, even though he knew Charlie would tell him anything, he didn’t know what to ask.
But he couldn’t sleep. So he fought. He was tired, and that made him angry most of the day, and he fought with his mother and father, acted like a baby, and got into wrestling matches with the other boys on the street. He bullied the younger ones, and he pushed the older boys to their limits. He would come home with scraped knees and a bloodied nose, and his mother would clean him up and bandage him and worry and console, and his father would tell him always to give better than he got. It made Alma sad that he fought, but it seemed to please Will in some way, as though the boy had put on the cloak of a man, heavy on his tiny frame, but carried with energy and purpose.
Sam didn’t know why, but he felt mad all the time. Mad and alone, even though he was surrounded by love. But he knew one thing: He wanted to see Charlie and Sylvan again and again and again. He wanted to be near them, to smell their smells and hear the sounds they made when they touched, when they took their clothes off.
Sometimes, he wished it would all go back to the way it was, when he and Charlie were alone in the world. Sometimes he wished they had never stopped at Sylvan Glass’s house, but not often. Now, when he saw them lying on a quilt down nea
r the riverbank, or watched them, sweat on his forehead, Jackie Robinson tied up and yowling in the yard, through the keyhole of the locked bedroom upstairs, he wanted to be them, to lie in the infinitely small sliver of space between their undulating bodies, to feel their skin smooth against his own, to melt into them, until he was nothing and they were, as they were, everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IN THE END, she owned everything he had and all he was. Every piece of Charlie’s land, except for the house in town where he lived and the flatland out by the river, was in her full legal possession. He gave it to her with an open hand and an open heart. He didn’t know any other way to say what was in his mute heart. He gave without hope of return, except that he hoped, so secretly that he couldn’t even say it to himself or even write it in his diary, that she would one day leave Boaty Glass and be his wife. He wanted her, and, once she had all of what he owned, he was glad and free. Now, when she walked on her land she was inhabiting his heart, living in his house, her joy in her fields and creeks and woods a joy, also, in him.
Sylvan didn’t understand the magnitude of it. She didn’t grasp that she was, by almost any measure, the richest woman in the county. Owning almost four thousand acres was to her just another simple pleasure, like wearing an armful of sparkling bangles he had given her. As he might have, if he could.
Presents from a lover. Simple things. Dirt and streams and magnolia and dogwood, it was all the same to her, and when she pulled back the floorboard in the attic and looked at the deeds to her land she’d hidden there, she was seeing the sparkle of a secret lover’s secret trinkets. The land of Sylvan. More than four thousand acres, no heavier than a cheap bracelet on her arm.
“Thank you,” she would say, say it often, and he would always answer, “It’s nothing,” and he meant it. It was nothing, nothing to him compared to the ache and storm of his love for her, nothing compared to what lay inside her eyes when she looked up at him in a certain kind of way, a way that said that things would be, were, all right, and he believed her, the way we always believe the things that are said to us by the people we love.
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