“Um . . . what’s so scandalous about that?” I asked.
“Brother Patrick, your young lady has told me that you are a Francophile. Will you explain the significance of that exchange to her?”
Pat put his arm around me. He kissed the top of my head. “I sure will. See, Ailey, two Americans didn’t need to speak in a foreign language unless they were trying to hide something from the other people in the room.”
I leaned away and looked up at him. “Maybe they were being fancy.”
“Or maybe they were having an affair. After all, baby, French is the language of love.”
My cheeks warmed as the old man told us, there were more than enough tidbits about that affair in the latest biography of the great scholar. All one had to do was put the clues together.
“So, wait,” I said. “You really think them two were messing around? But Dr. Du Bois was married!”
The old man shrugged. He sighed. He had never wanted to speak ill of the great scholar when I was younger, but now I was old enough to hear the truth, that Dr. Du Bois had been a well-known Lothario. So many mistresses—so many—all over the country: white women, Negro women, young and old. He’d given Mrs. Du Bois such trouble over the decades, causing scandals. And imagine how Miss Fauset had felt, when she’d really been his junior wife! Or would have been, over in Africa. Those two poor, long-suffering women. It was awful, the way the great scholar had mistreated them, all the while writing essays about the need to protect the equal rights of Negro women. Such rank hypocrisy, but still, Dr. Du Bois had been a brilliant man who’d labored in the service of our people. And all extraordinary human beings had their faults.
* * *
For Easter, Pat coaxed me down the interstate to meet his parents at St. Anthony’s in the West End, their family parish. He didn’t need to play on my guilt, though. I wanted to meet them.
He and I slipped into the pew at nine forty-five for the morning Mass, and I put my purse on the pew to save two extra seats. I told him, we should have come the night before for vigil, because the holiday sinners crowded out the regulars on Sunday. Look at that line for Communion. When we returned to our pew, I was supposed to kneel like my mother had taught me. I should think on the goodness of the Lord, but I cheated by half sitting on my haunches. I ran through my calculus homework. My eyes were closed when I heard Pat’s whispered greeting to his parents, and I kept my head bowed, wanting to impress them. When I finished my fake prayers, they were sitting on Pat’s other side.
After Mass, we lingered in the pew until the church emptied. I leaned over Pat and shook the soft hand of Mrs. Lindsay, who wore a paisley blouse tucked into a black skirt.
Clothed in a blue linen suit, Pat’s father was a handsome man, though much fairer than his son. His pate was bald, the sides cut low. Though his remaining hair was curly, not straight, Mr. Lindsay was a dead ringer for my grandfather, when Gandee had been a much younger man. My breath caught. In my spotty memory, I saw the picture, framed in silver and hanging on Nana’s red-painted wall.
“Young lady, it’s so good to meet you,” Mr. Lindsay said.
I couldn’t speak, as Pat’s father held my hand. I smiled and nodded at Gandee’s brown eyes ringed with Gandee’s salt-and-pepper lashes. I thought of those times with my grandfather in the bathtub, his showing me how to touch his red penis, how to put my small mouth on it. My heart trotted as I tried to swallow. It was the Communion wafer. It wouldn’t go down.
“This boy has nothing but praise about you,” Mr. Lindsay said. “And now I can see why.”
“Yes, sir.” That was all I could manage, but everyone laughed, before Pat’s parents left the church to walk to a lot down the street, where the latecomers parked.
It was a long drive on the interstate, out toward Cobb County, where the Lindsays now lived in a McMansion. They’d finally given up their smaller house off Cascade, where they knew everybody. They’d loved southwest Atlanta. They’d raised their children there, and the schools couldn’t be beat, but they were getting older now, and southwest was turning bad. So now they were surrounded by wealthy white folks who didn’t speak or invite them to Saturday barbecues, but on the plus side, they didn’t have to worry about some crack fiend breaking into their basement.
Pat’s older sister, Collette, was in the living room. Her husband was with his parents at their Baptist church. Collette was a plump, shorter version of Pat. In her arms, a sleeping baby girl in a lace bonnet, white satin dress and shoes to match. The other child, a toddler in a pastel blue Easter suit, white shirt, and bow tie, ran around like a lunatic.
“Look how pretty you made them,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “Why didn’t y’all come to Mass?”
Collette shifted the sleeping baby.
“Mama, you know I can’t take that boy to church. I can barely get him in the car seat. Stop now, R.J.! Before you get dizzy.”
Her little boy ignored her, spinning in circles. Then he tired of that and tugged at my boyfriend’s cuff until he was lifted and turned upside down several times. When his uncle put him down, R.J. began to shriek. He wanted to be picked up again.
“Not now,” Pat said. “And quit that noise. You embarrassing me in front of my company.”
“Don’t be mean,” I said. “He’s just a little boy.”
I kneeled down and held out my arms.
“He doesn’t like strangers,” Collette said, moments before R.J. moved into my arms. When he kissed my cheek, there were approving sounds. A check mark for me in the “pro” column.
“Well, I’ll be dog,” Mr. Lindsay said.
“I told y’all she was sweet,” Pat said.
I sat R.J. on my thighs and cut my food into tiny bits and fed him, glad for the distraction, that he ate my dinner when I couldn’t. But then he fell asleep in my arms, and when Mrs. Lindsay took him upstairs to the guest room, I had no shield, nothing to defend me from the attention of Pat’s father. I moved my chair closer to Pat and continually drank water to wet my closing throat. I cut the one slice of Easter ham I’d asked for, using my excellent table manners to move the meat around the plate.
Mr. Lindsay kept approving of me, by praising my origins, and his wife agreed, when she returned. They loved my great-great-uncle; what a brilliant man Dr. Hargrace was. What a fine teacher he’d been. Routledge had been so lucky to have him for so many years. They’d met my parents, though they’d been three years behind Mama and Daddy at Routledge. And they made broad, rueful hints about a wedding, hopefully in not too many years.
When we left, Mrs. Lindsay hugged me in the foyer. Mr. Lindsay did, too, and I gave thanks to the resurrected savior that he didn’t wear the same hair oil as Gandee, because I would have vomited in the foyer, instead of waiting an hour, when Pat turned onto Highway 441. I told him, stop the car. Right now. Stop. I threw up only water.
* * *
There were only forty days left until Pat’s graduation when he told me it was time to come out as a couple.
“Everybody knows already. The other day, somebody called you my girlfriend.”
“But you’re graduating. How is this supposed to work?”
“I’ll be right in Athens at the University of Georgia. I can come see you all the time. Or, you know, we could get an apartment there and you could drive to classes. We could get out this funky trailer.”
“What are you saying? I love our trailer.”
Every day, it circled: his pressing me, and my excuses. I don’t want to remember his face when I told him I’d had my fun. It had been great, but it was time for me to move on. I cried myself when he started weeping.
We made love that last time, and inside me, he begged, don’t do him like this. Don’t leave him. Didn’t I know how much he loved me? I was his whole world, and I almost changed my mind, until afterward. When we lay there and Pat reminded me that his parents were coming for the graduation ceremony. Since Easter, Mr. Lindsay had talked nonstop about me.
My fears about Mr. Lindsay weren�
��t real. I knew that. The man couldn’t help looking like my monster of a grandfather, but I couldn’t help casting my gaze down the road of years, either. If I joined Pat’s family—if we married—there would be no logical excuse to avoid holidays with his people. My memories wouldn’t be dust, but animated flesh sitting across the table. I’d try not to vomit as I looked in the face of a man who resembled Gandee. I’d relive old outrages. I’d rush from the room as Pat tried to justify my bad manners. I’d lock myself in the bathroom while he tapped on the door, begging me to come out. Asking, Girl, what’s wrong? But I couldn’t tell him: Pat, your perfectly nice father disgusts me. And what of our offspring? How long could I keep them away from Atlanta? And when Pat insisted it was time for them to meet their grandparents, what could I say to Mr. Lindsay? What explanation could follow, after I shouted at him, don’t you dare touch my children?
* * *
In the morning, Pat asked me not to go back to Abdul. He had a feeling Abdul might be trying to come back around. It wasn’t only jealousy, either: something was wrong with that guy. He couldn’t be happy or treat a woman right. I deserved better. I gave Pat my promise. And I hoped he would forgive me, for hurting him. He deserved better, too.
Nguzo Saba
Sometimes, when a person is dying of a terminal disease, he rallies for a short period. His cheeks fill with color. There’s extra elasticity when he rises from the couch. He wants to buy Christmas presents himself, not send someone else out to the department store with his list. This is what happened with my father, when he was recovering from surgery after his second heart attack.
There had been the dozen bottles of pills on the dresser, but my mother hadn’t bothered to look up the names of the medicines. Her job was to take care of him and cook heart-healthy meals. Even Coco hadn’t been aware that my father would not recover. Usually she was sharp, but she was in the second year of her residency at City Memorial Hospital and she was exhausted. Daddy had deceived all of us about his grave prognosis.
It was Dr. King’s birthday when my mother found my father dead in their bedroom. They’d been planning on going to church; our priest had planned a special service. After her shower, she’d dried herself and was taking her hair from the curlers when she noticed Daddy wasn’t moving. I was her first call. She reached me at the dorm.
“Ailey, I was telling him that I’d cook him bacon, since it was a holiday. He’d been begging for months, and the one time I was going to let him cheat, he couldn’t even enjoy it. I feel so bad.”
To keep from pushing her grief forward, I wept with no noise, as her voice altered on the phone between her usual alto and a high, tormented soprano. I closed my eyes and saw her story.
It was my senior year. There was a special convocation in the chapel that morning, but I can’t tell you who the speaker was or what they said. After, I went to the refectory but didn’t reveal to my roommates what had happened. If I didn’t utter that my father was dead, he wouldn’t be. And I wanted to call Pat, so much. He was only ninety minutes away in Athens, but nothing would change, no matter how I felt about him. It wouldn’t be fair to use him, just because I was grieving.
I drove to Chicasetta and then back to campus. I looped the journey five more times before driving to the old man’s house. It was dark, but the porch lights were on and he was sitting on the glider. He’d poured some liquor in a glass for me.
“He’s really dead, isn’t he, Uncle Root?”
“Yes, he is. I’m so sorry.”
“How could he leave me? How could Daddy do that?”
As I cried, scotch dribbled out of my mouth and I wiped it away. I moved down and laid my head on his shoulder.
“I know, I know. It’s all right, sugarfoot.”
We drank the whole bottle that night, the beginning of many times that I’d share a drink with the old man. I wished I hadn’t had to lose my father to earn my rite of passage.
Down in Chicasetta, it was a pretty time. A sharp, goose-bump wind was the only indication of winter the day God got in His laugh—the way my mother had let her hopes rise, that my father was going to beat his illness. And the Lord was slapping us blind when He made sure that my father stayed in a cooler for a week up in the City while my mother drove around unsafe neighborhoods, Aunt Diane riding shotgun, as they looked for Lydia.
My other sister had refused those drives. She wasn’t going out there with them. They both needed to forget about Lydia. Pray for her and let her go. But Coco didn’t have a mother’s love. Until a woman births her own, she can’t know what it feels like to have her breasts ache with milk, years later, after a dream, when there is no suckling child. Mama knew that marrow-filled affection, but finally, she let go of her hope that Lydia would return and shipped Daddy’s body to Chicasetta. She laid him to rest in our family cemetery, behind the charred plantation house. Throughout their years together, he’d told her he didn’t care what happened, so long as he was buried where she would be buried. He wanted to sleep beside his woman.
I suspected Nana Claire would have been upset about the location of my father’s grave. That she might have objected, saying she wanted her son buried up in the City, but the previous autumn, she’d had a stroke. The day after my father had died, Mama told Nana her son was gone. Nana cried, but the next morning, she couldn’t remember what had happened. So my mother reminded her, but again, my grandmother couldn’t hold on to grief, and my mother wouldn’t tell her a third time. She couldn’t take the sadness of that daily knowledge, that Nana’s tears were temporary.
* * *
After my father’s funeral, I stayed nights in Chicasetta, driving to campus only for classes. I didn’t think of graduation or what my future would bring. All I could think about was my father, hoping he wasn’t lonely in his casket.
I still hadn’t told anyone on campus about my loss, for fear of breaking down. My roommates kept asking, was something wrong? But I told them, leave me alone, and in the afternoons, I’d drive back to the old man’s house. He’d stand in the doorway of my room, and ask, could he get me anything? I didn’t seem to be eating. Maybe a slice of pie, and I told him I wasn’t hungry. I just wanted to sleep.
Then, Mrs. Stripling left a pink slip for me under my door: Come see me. Urgent.
When I knocked on her door, she demanded to know where I had been sleeping nights.
“Ailey, this is unacceptable. You can’t just be staying out like this—”
“It’s my daddy, Mrs. Stripling,” I said. “My daddy died.”
I began to shake, unable to continue, and she opened her arms to me. Every time I tried to speak, a new wave of tears, as she held me, whispering, oh, baby. Oh, I’m so sorry. She told me I needed to be with my people. Sleep in Chicasetta as long as I liked. She would make an exception, and we would keep that between us.
Four months later, when my mother came down for my graduation, I told her I’d decided to defer my first year of medical school at Mecca University, based upon family emergency. Classes for med school were supposed to start in June, but I thought deferral was a better option than flunking out. We were in my dorm room, packing up my belongings. I’d asked my roommates to clear out so I could have some time alone with my mother.
“What about Morehouse in Atlanta? You could go there instead. It’s probably not too late to contact them, and you could be close to Root. I know you’d like that.” Her back was turned as she filled a box with books.
“Mama, it’s too late to apply. And anyway, I’m not sure I want to be a doctor. I don’t think it’s going to make me happy.”
“Is that all? Girl, nobody’s ever happy working! That’s why it’s called a ‘job’ instead of ‘pleasure.’ But you know what would make you happy? Making a lot of money and having good credit. Buying yourself some nice things. Finally driving a new car.”
“I’ve already contacted Mecca. The deferral is only for a year, until I get myself together.”
She kept packing boxes, and on our journey b
ack to the City she was quiet in the car. That only lasted a few days, though. Soon, she began telling me I needed to go to med school. Several times a day, she brought it up, unless Aunt Diane told her, stop haranguing her niece. She and my youngest cousin were living with us, now that my aunt and uncle were divorced. But Mama only would stay quiet for a while, before she started up again: Sure, take the year off, but be sure to contact Mecca University and let them know I would be ready to start medical school next summer. And if they told me that I had to reapply, then do that, too. Whatever it took to get my life going.
* * *
Over the months, to speed my progress, Mama popped her head into my room and offered daily, curt clichés: “Quitters never win” and “Put your best foot forward” and “Rise early and keep your hand on the plow.” Mornings, if the sidewalks were clear, Mama took her own advice. When the light appeared, she put on her tracksuit and took up her pepper spray. She would not miss her morning walk. Daily sunshine was important.
Sundays, she took a rest from talking about medical school, but still, she knocked on my door. “You sure you don’t want to go to Mass, baby?”
“No, I’m good.”
“But Father Dan keeps asking about you.”
“That’s nice of him. You tell him to pray for me.”
“Ailey, you better not get smart about God. You gone need Him one day.”
After church, she’d invite me to dinner at Nana’s, where everyone now collected. The stroke had come as a surprise. She’d always eaten sparingly and watched her weight, but when Coco had moved into the house to take care of Nana, she’d found the stash of Gauloises, along with the jade holder. When Coco ordered an MRI, the consulting doctor told her this hadn’t been our grandmother’s first stroke; she’d had some mini-strokes as well.
Nana needed the support of her family, my mother told me. That’s why I should come to dinner, and besides, I should meet Melissa. She was my grandmother’s caretaker, now that Miss Delores had retired. If I ever came to Sunday dinner, I could see what a nice girl she was. Melissa was real pretty. Big-boned, too, not one of them skinny types. Also, she was my sister’s girlfriend.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 39