***
They landed in Florence and it was more of a honeymoon than their two weeks in Massachusetts had been. They stayed in the Hotel Tornabuoni Beacci, a place where, they decided, the Brownings had stayed— and they agreed with each other that both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had been black.
Hope gave Abel the little copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese that her mother had given her father, and that her father had given Hope.
She showed Abel where her father had underlined the words that her mother had woven into her wedding ceremony, “I love thee freely, as men strive for Right” and “A place to stand and love in for a day.” Abel asked Hope why they hadn’t used the same words in their wedding. Hope confessed she had thought they might be bad luck. She was thinking about her mother’s death in Rome but she still wasn’t speaking of it. Abel said he preferred the words she had chosen anyway. Then he took out the fancy fountain pen she had given him as an engagement present and underlined twice the words they had spoken, “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”
They had a cocktail near a tree Hope had planted in a hotel roof garden as a baby girl and she told him the story her father had told her, about her mother decorating a tiny live tree in their room with earrings, heavy and shiny with precious and semiprecious stones; and she told him about another year with CeCe when they had decorated a larger tree with Lifesavers and foil-covered chocolate candy.
Abel loved the stories about Christmas in Italy so much that she didn’t tell him Christmas in Italy was how her mother had died.
She wasn’t sure if she didn’t tell Abel because she was afraid he would no longer be able to boast, “My wife’s family Christmased in Florence,” or because she feared that even after he knew, he might be able to boast with undisturbed pride, “We always cook Italian food for Christmas; it reminds Hope of Christmasing in Florence as a child.”
She hated those stories the way he hated the double strand of fake black South Sea pearls that she thought were real. He loved the stories like she loved that necklace.
They ran down to Rome, took ecstasy, romped for a day and a half, and thought they would be in love forever.
She had stared at one, then another inch of him; she had been deliciously amazed. She lay naked in a claw-foot tub of cool water, thinking slowly, turning over harder and harder remembered visions, as all fractured into color and shape, and as tinier and tinier bits formed into larger and larger and more beautiful and more colorful patterns. Any pain she had ever experienced was now fractured and vanquished and returned to her as glowing jewels of now and know—joy past pain. Her mind was like a kaleidoscope. She lay back in a chipped tub, arms draped over the side toward the dull floor, a window open to the street, and she was thanking heaven for 1985 and friends, and ecstasy and mommies, even if they died, and daddies even if they killed people, and for husbands and vaginas, and for the very spit on her tongue. That December in Rome she accepted all of it—thanks to a pharmacological wedding gift from the best of Abel’s Duke law school friends.
FIFTEEN
WHEN SHE PULLED up to the agreed-upon corner not at the agreed-upon time, in their tiny tan Ford Escort, that mid-December in 1985, Abel was standing, slightly slumped, stomping his fleece-lined duck boots into the concrete sidewalk. Snowflakes fell on his tweed-covered shoulders and on his bare head.
“Now comes the big lie,” said Nicholas.
“And so many little ones with it,” said Hope.
Watching her young and new husband from across the intersection, waiting for the red light to turn green, Hope had imagined for the very first time a son, a boy with sherry-colored eyes and dark hair and full sweet lips.
Abel was a beautiful man. She remembered seeing it, his beauty, clearly in the gray light of the streetlamp that December evening. The rush she felt was akin to coming upon a lost and valued item in an unexpected place at an unexpected time, long after hope for recovery had past. An inch over six feet, well muscled, with dark-amber-colored eyes, an aquiline nose, and exquisitely sculpted Greek lips, Abel was crowned not with a wreath of laurel, but with close-cropped curly dark hair that had sprouted preternaturally, at twenty-six, four or five silver hairs.
Whenever Hope noticed his silver kinks she shivered. The silver hairs on his head reminded her of the three silver hairs that had appeared south of her belly button. They each of them had their worries.
She was not late accidentally. Puttering around Alexandria, fluttering and dithering about the Federal-style town house where she spent her days ironing napkins and shirts and making dinner and feeding the pets and making the bed and worrying about what she would cook her new husband for breakfast, then dinner, then wondering where she would walk on her own for her lunch—between all that and going to the grocery store, Hope searched for the life she had misplaced, the self she had lost without warning or fanfare.
Or perhaps there had been fanfare. The trumpet voluntary. With her opportunities limited to “rush toward Abel” and “be dragged behind him” it was hard to make a choice, any choice, including “What time shall I leave to pick my husband up from work?”
And she wanted to make him wait for her, wanted to control the timing of some small event in their lives, to feel something of her old power, to remind him that she was the ladder and when the ladder got knocked out the man standing on it fell.
She was a trophy wife of a very particular persuasion. He loved having a stay-at-home wife, a woman with a Harvard degree, ironing his undershorts and his shirts; he loved having something his white and northern peers would never have because white Ivy-educated girls were past (having seen their mothers entombed and having witnessed their mothers’ revolutions), way past, dreams of isolated homes as castles.
She had propped him up high, she would prop him up higher, she would be his high horse, his stepping stone, his ladder— but as he understood it, then, she wanted him to adore her for it. He couldn’t. He wanted to find all of that inevitable.
She had chosen the wrong day to make him wait. She could see it through the windshield and across the cold air, in his posture a slump-shouldered but high-chinned resignation. He looked too changed.
The light turned green. As she began to accelerate through the intersection she was glad that she had dressed as he would have wanted to see her dressed, in gray wool pants, a red turtleneck, and a cream-colored fisherman’s sweater. She thought of telling a lie, of saying that she had been stuck in traffic, or that she had taken a wrong turn trying to take a shortcut. She didn’t. Those days they told the truth whenever they could.
She pulled up to the curb beside Abel. His face was red, she supposed from the bite of the wind. Usually he came to the driver side and waited for her to run round to the passenger door and let herself in before he settled into the driver’s seat. That night he just opened the passenger door and slid in beside her quietly, unexpectedly, like husbands sometimes slip into sleeping wives.
They hadn’t gone half a block when he realized his door wasn’t completely shut. He cussed the weather as he slammed the door hard, leaning his head toward the cold window instead of leaning in for a kiss.
Everything was wrong. There was a baby softness in his face she had never seen before; his smile looked premature. His chiseled lips, engorged, perhaps from crying, appeared like plump bumpers between the world and his throat. It occurred to her to wonder if he had just swallowed, or choked, or retched. What she could see for sure was this: sometime between the time she had dropped him off in the morning outside the Crystal City outpost of the State Department where he daily took instruction, in she didn’t know quite what, and the time she had pulled up to the corner of Roxindale Avenue and Kefauver Place, he had lost a skin. She was sorrier than sorry that she was late.
The young bride wasn’t ready, was no longer ready, to injure her groom. She was spooked.
And she didn’t know it. She didn’t know that she was driving into a scene constructed to eli
cit her sympathy and mute her hypervigilance. His defeat had been coached. She was walking into a sweet-as-arsenic lie.
He said they were going to the Philippines. He said he hadn’t been given any of the posts he had requested, that he wasn’t getting to learn Chinese or Arabic, that they were headed almost immediately for Manila. His flat voice begged for pity.
She had none to give. No pity for herself; no pity for him. She had something: a towering hopefulness that things would work out. She had a faith, which she tried to disguise and feminize in a ditzy mantra of “When life sends you lemons, squeeze them in your sweet tea and thank God you were born southern.” She believed herself to be a find-a-way, make-a-way, or die-trying woman.
She had that and it tethered her to him. He loved the gray slacks. He loved the red turtleneck. He loved the fisherman’s sweater. She was classic and exotic. She was so far from the blues, and so far from irony, she was unlike any black, brown, yellow, or white girl he had known. He liked that best.
She’s my Alka-Seltzer: plop, plop, fizz, fizz, o-o-o what a relief she is. That’s what he had been thinking as he’d walked down the left aisle of St. John’s Lafayette Square toward the one white priest sandwiched between two black ones. Just before the chords of Vivaldi’s “Trumpet Voluntary” had filled the sanctuary he had thought: I have dropped effervescent intellect into the half-empty glass of my life and soon my cup will runneth over. As he had stood at the altar with James Hall, waiting for Hope to come down the aisle in her grandmother Emmaline’s gown, those had been the words in his head.
And there was the thing that Abel liked best about her, the thing he was counting on: dust, or shit, or mud, she could change all that to black gold. She could change an asshole into a penis. Erotic alchemy. She would transform him into someone wonderful, someone commensurate with her capacity for making dreams go real.
“Nothing on your list?”
“They called me in and asked if I would take Manila.”
He said it as if he were saying, they called me in and asked me if I couldn’t please sit in the back of the bus, told me that all the buses were going to the same place at the same time and it was too much trouble for everybody, for anybody to make trouble. If he would suck it up and sit in the back of the bus everyone would get where they were going. Eventually. He spoke in a way, hanging his head down low, contrived to provoke Hope into thinking all of that.
“Manila.”
“Manila.”
She didn’t really know where the Philippines were more specifically than somewhere on the other edge of the earth, somewhere in Asia, somewhere not Europe or Africa or America, and not China or Japan. All she knew about the Philippines the day they were assigned was that it was a place maids came from and where soldiers served. She imagined it like some giant West Texas army base.
No Chinese lessons, no Arabic, no Guangzhou, no Ankara, no Istanbul, no place anyone would want to come and visit, or anyone would want to live. Manila. It was like being assigned to McDonald’s. She’d rather face the open toilets and the strange food in South China. It was a second blow.
The first had been the list itself. No London, no Paris, no Rome. It was what the State Department called a hard-language list, full of postings that required Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and maybe Russian—a job list top to bottom of hardship posts with hardship pay. Manila was one of these. For Abel and Hope it was the bottom of a bad list. Manila had not made their short list.
She had imagined being sent off to London, or Rome, when she had imagined herself a diplomat’s wife: a chic young woman, in some chic old place, husband and wife, broke and brilliant somewhere with a culture she could immerse herself in and learn; a culture that would entice her to go native and abandon her old and contradictory cultures of origin, perhaps even discover that her own cultures were inferior, or better still, reconciled. She sought a city where they, Abel and Hope, together, could represent what it was to be American, even if he had never felt fully American in America.
Identity arbitrage. She almost told him he should quit. Almost reminded him he didn’t need the job. She didn’t say this, though, mainly because she didn’t want to make it harder for him to do what he wanted to do: accept his first honors, and his first duties. She loved him that much.
He had been chosen to represent his country. He would be the face of America for foreigners. He liked that. He liked it a lot. There was a simple irony in the thing that enticed him at the beginning and consoled him to the end. And the Department had chosen him blindly, based on the Foreign service Test. He liked that too. He wanted to believe that meritocracy and level playing fields were the American way. That was the mantra he had chanted to himself every morning for a year when he had read, from first page to last, the first section of the New York Times in preparation for the entrance exam.
One way of looking at it was that Abel and Hope had found themselves side by side, but one was moving in one direction, toward the large world, and one was moving in the other, toward the South. For a moment they were side by side in the same place and the future outstretched before them was alluring and obtainable.
All she could think about as she attempted to steer the car back to Alexandria through the rain and traffic was the little blue and white china teapot the Lyles had given them with Chinese characters written all over it and how she had secretly doubted Abel’s ability to learn Chinese. She feared that doubt had cursed them. It wasn’t that he was not smart; it was that he was undisciplined and easily bored, or so she believed. She had wished for a posting where he could succeed. Be careful what you wish for. And now they were leaving in February, almost immediately, too soon.
She had expected a year or more of hard-language study, a year and a half probably because he wouldn’t pass his language tests the first time, a year and a half of getting to know this man she had married and of saying good-bye to the city where she had started her life as a more expected kind of black person. She had wanted to see the city while hanging on his arm, hiding behind his back, peering over his shoulder, but now that was something she thought she would do later— but she never did it at all.
They would return to live in Washington, return for their halcyon time in the federal city, but that would be after. After two armed marines, sent to fetch them and shuttle them home safely, had found them walking arm in arm, oblivious, in Manila outside the CCP Main Building, still talking about Tokyo Story, the Ozu classic film they had both managed to previously miss. After they had feigned, each to the other, their shock at having missed the film previously, they didn’t have to fake being pleased that their chosen life had demanded that they see it now. After the marines had shuttled them from the movie theater back to Sea Front on the night the People Power Revolution had begun. After they had broken curfew to leave the compound and dance at the Playboy Club till dawn, into the first morning of the Revolution. After Abel had been called to the palace to help pack the Marcoses up and move them out. After he had been one of the ones standing by as the Marcoses had boarded the helicopter, checking, he had teased, to make sure they hadn’t tried to pack up any of General Yamashita’s gold. After she had wandered around for ten days with her wedding silver in her purse, in case of quick evacuation; after the Marcoses had left and she and Abel had started weekending in Baguio, once spending a house party weekend at the ambassador’s residence with the sultan of Brunei. After she had missed so many occasions to see what he was really about. After all of that, they would be back in Washington, she would have a baby, and he would be learning French, a language (and an easy language) at last, and they would be going down to Martinique.
The next time she returned to Washington to live with Abel she didn’t look, or feel, or think, back toward Alexandria or even LeDroit Park; she just started a new life in a different enclave, in Georgetown. She succeeded in putting out of her mind all she had seen in the Philippines. As a young Georgetown matron she would take her baby for walks in Dumbarton Oaks and go to the same early-mor
ning aerobics classes as Sandra Day O’Connor at a dance studio called Somebodies. But that baby had yet to be conceived. She had to not flip out the night they were assigned to Manila for Ajay to get born.
She had to close her eyes to follow him. And stop her ears. She closed her eyes and stopped her ears. She wanted to follow him. And he looked so good to her. And he played so well with her.
Hope believed everybody black enjoying all the new opportunities of being young, gifted, and black owed a debt to the youngest black southerners whose childhoods had been slaughtered by the march to freedom. She accepted the responsibility of providing compensation.
She was twenty-six years old and she thought she knew how to give them both back their innocence. She would have his baby.
The night they got their first tour assignment, before everything that came after, they drove the rest of the way to Alexandria, toward their first neighborhood and their first home, in silence.
The Gabbons would have to find someone else to take care of Philoctete, the huge rottweiler; someone else to use the silver and the china, to change the cat boxes, and walk the dog, and play house in their exquisite home; someone else to make the onion tart Mrs. Gabbon had taught Hope, the onion tart she had served in posts around the world, the onion tart that Hope would cook in Manila and in Martinique, though she didn’t know that yet.
The house was beautiful. The kitchen and dining room were on the floor below street level; the kitchen was tiny and tidy, with green-blue planking quite Federal, and the dining room was lovely, with a stone floor and inset shelves and beautiful brass chandeliers.
Philoctete, called Philo, had been trained by the South African police. He weighed more than Hope did those days and all the weight was muscle, 135 pounds. They said his bite could kill a man. They said he was so heavily muscled and so well trained that he could kill a man after he had been shot. He only took commands from one person. It was decided it would be Hope because she was home all day. Or so she was told.
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