Unforgivable Love

by Sophfronia Scott

  Cecily looked at her mother. “Why do you invite him, Mama, if you don’t like him?”

  Mama suddenly looked like she needed to do something with her hands. She picked up the teapot and refilled all their cups.

  She said, “Honey, you’re gonna learn soon enough money opens every door in Harlem. A lot of people don’t like Mr. Jackson, but they certainly love his money.”

  Mae chuckled. “But it only gets him so far.”

  “That’s because it’s dirty money,” Mama said. She put down the teapot and pointed a finger at no one in particular. “His daddy and his granddaddy—both bootleggers.”

  “They run the numbers right out of that club of his,” said Mae. “That’s why he’ll never have what he really wants.”

  Cecily opened her mouth to ask what Mr. Jackson wanted but Mama, hearing the man’s footsteps near the door, quickly hushed her.

  “He wants to own a baseball team,” she hissed. “But nobody with gambling in their background gets to buy into a team no matter how much money they got.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Val

  Harlem, May 1947—Sunday Morning

  When Val Jackson walked in, his hat held over his chest and his smile filling the room, Gladys greeted him with such cheer one would have thought it was her parlor, not her cousin’s. “Oh, Mr. Jackson! What a nice surprise!”

  “Yes,” said Mae. “Quite the surprise.”

  Val bowed and smiled. “Oh, there’s no way I’d ever run up out of this city without paying my respects to you, Miss Malveaux.”

  Mae’s chin tilted up. “Leaving the city?”

  He was pleased he had gotten her attention. He took her hand, ran his thumb over its soft skin, and kissed it. “Not forever, ma’am, not forever. I’m going to visit my aunt Rose at her Westchester estate. She’s invited me up to escape this heat.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Jarreau has invited us too!” declared Gladys warmly. “Cecily, Mrs. Jarreau owns half of Harlem. She and her husband were buying real estate before most colored people knew the meaning of the words. Your daddy handled a lot of her business. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to take her up on her generous offer; there’s been so much to do with Cecily. You remember my daughter, don’t you? She’s been visiting with our people down in North Carolina.”

  Val feigned surprise. “This is little Cecily? No! I don’t believe it!” He positioned himself behind the girl, his hands on the back of her chair. “The last time I saw you was at one of your mama’s parties, sitting up there on the steps listening to everybody when you were probably supposed to be in bed!”

  Gladys chafed and moved her mouth as if to say something. He looked at her like her next words might be the best thing he’d hear all day. “Yes, well . . .” She sipped her tea instead.

  Mae, to his delight, artfully filled in for her. “Well, I wish someone would invite me out for some good clean air. Lord knows how stuffy it can get in Harlem when it warms up. It was positively sweltering in that church this morning!”

  “I’d be happy to put in a good word for you with Aunt Rose.” He leaned over Cecily’s shoulder toward Mae.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I was joking.”

  “Yes, honey, you can go up to your own country house any time you want,” said Gladys, looking hard at Val. “Mae, it’s time for us to go. I told old Mrs. Walker we’d stop by and holler at her before Sunday dinner. Come on, Cecily.”

  The girl pouted, he noticed, with a deliciously plump lip.

  “Oh, Mama, do we have to? I’m so tired.”

  “You should get your rest,” Val said. “It’d be a mighty shame to see those pretty eyes tired.”

  Gladys stared at him as she stood. He stepped out of the way so she could reach her daughter and pull Cecily to her feet. “Mae, we’ll be in touch?”

  “Of course.”

  Cecily stumbled. He saw she had taken off one of her shoes under the table. Her cheeks colored and she dove down to find it and came up wobbling. Val reached for her other arm and steadied her.

  “You take care now,” he said.

  Cecily barely got out a tiny “thank you” before Gladys whisked her away and out the door.

  Val started to laugh, but Mae put a finger to her lips. She went to the window and watched as Lawrence escorted Gladys and Cecily into the car. When they were safely on their way, Mae gave in and they both let loose with satisfying mirth. He enjoyed being with her like this, above anything and everyone who couldn’t be what they were.

  “All right, Val, what’s this bull about going to Westchester? You never leave during baseball season and everyone knows Rose Jarreau is already leaving everything to you.”

  “Oh, baby, will you miss me?”

  Mae’s spine stiffened. She touched the side of his face then gave it a playful, but significant, slap. “Don’t call me that. But of course I will. Especially now—I need you. That’s why I called you over here. You know I don’t like you hanging around. I have my reputation to think of.”

  The slap didn’t hurt but it woke him up. It reminded him to be careful. He turned away from her and sat on the sofa. “I’m at your service.” Mae went to a box on the mantel, took out a cigarette, and lit it. When she had drawn the smoke into her lungs and released it she said, “Remember when Frank Washington and I ended things last year?”

  “That old prick? So what?” Val put his hands behind his head and crossed his ankles.

  “And where did he go? Off with that jelly-bellied lover of yours.”

  He nodded. When he had been distracted with other pursuits Frank did manage to pluck Delia Song, a dancer from the World’s Fair who had attained a certain level of fame and notoriety after that event.

  “I was glad her fat ass was gone.”

  “Or so you wanted everyone to think.” Mae sat down next to him and offered the smoking cigarette. He took it and tapped it over a crystal ashtray on the table next to him. He drew on it.

  “Like I said, so what?”

  “Well, the old prick is getting married.” She leaned back on her side of the sofa and touched a toe to his thigh. He blew out smoke in a thin white stream.

  “To her? Who the hell cares?”

  “No, no, no. She’s not his type. Not really. Frank always had a weakness for the virginal type—young and fresh. The rest he only toys with.”

  “Like he did with you.”

  “And . . .” She looked at Val, her gaze hard as ice.

  He knew that look. He likened it to what a bull must look like right before it charges. He steeled himself by laughing again. Then he sat up and stubbed out the cigarette.

  “And Lord have mercy on the man who toys with Mae Malveaux!”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ah, yes, I love it!” He rubbed his hands together. “Ladies and gentlemen, sweet revenge is our game and our beautiful ace Mae Malveaux is on the mound. Let’s sit back and enjoy the heat!”

  “Oh, you’ll get to play too,” said Mae, pushing at Val’s shoulder. “I know who Frank has chosen as his intended.”

  Val frowned for a moment, then his eyes lit up. “You’re kidding!”

  Mae laughed and leaned back into the sofa again. “Yes. Our little hothouse flower from the South: Cecily Vaughn. I want you to seduce her. Get her pregnant if you like, I don’t care. I just want it to be clear to Mr. Washington on his wedding night that he’s the biggest fool in Harlem if not all of New York City.”

  “Very nice.” He nodded slowly, thinking.

  “Frank is leaving tomorrow for Martha’s Vineyard for the entire month. That should give you plenty of time. And you would enjoy yourself. She’s so ready.”

  Val sighed. He got up and helped himself to bourbon at Mae’s cocktail cart. “And so easy. Too easy.”

  “What?” She got up and followed him.

  “Come on, Mae, this is beneath me, you know it is.” He dropped ice into his drink from a silver bucket. “I’m not some hard-up boy off the street. I’m a man who needs a ch
allenge. That girl will have her skirt up and her legs open for the first man who looks at her cockeyed.”

  “Ha!” She turned her back on him and threw herself onto the sofa.

  “You know I’m right! You wanna talk reputation, well, I have a reputation to think of. I’m not an ordinary man. I don’t bed ordinary women. And Lord knows there’s nothing out of the ordinary about Cecily Vaughn.” He sipped his drink then put it down. He pulled a cushioned ottoman over to Mae and sat down in front of her. He lifted her leg, the fullness of her calf fitting perfectly into his hand. His fingers brushed Mae’s thigh and he began to slowly move them a half inch up her skirt. “My conquest has to have something extra special about her.”

  Mae sat up and pulled her leg back. “Aren’t you being a little presumptuous? Unless—” She paused and looked up as though she had to pull an answer hanging right in front of her. “Yes! You have a totally different conquest in mind?”

  Val picked up his glass and went to the window. He sipped his whiskey.

  “Tell me.”

  He stayed silent.

  “You know I’ll find out soon enough.” Mae got up and stood behind him. She ran her well-manicured fingers down his spine.

  He said nothing.

  “Val.” She pinched the back of his arm.

  “All right, all right. Look, it’s nothing, Mae. Come on, it’s nothing!”

  Her eyes thinned to needles. Before they could pierce him he spoke fast.

  “If it’s that important to you, I’ll do it.”

  She crossed her arms and seemed to reappraise him. “You will?”

  “Sure. I’m not gonna be gone that long, a couple of days, that’s it.”

  He lifted his hand to smooth a small lock of hair near her temple. She smiled and seemed to accept this tiny pleasure before retreating a safe distance to pour her own drink.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He returned to the sofa and leaned back with his hands behind his head. The lie had been an improvisation, but necessary. His Elizabeth Townsend project was still too new and too fragile to have Mae anywhere near it.

  CHAPTER 11

  Val

  Mercylands, Late May 1947

  The hot sun reached through the windows of the northbound Cadillac, and Val Jackson closed his eyes. With Sebastian at the wheel he was content to give in to the sleepiness without a struggle. There was nothing outside he needed to see, no part of the landscape he didn’t already know as well as his own face. When he was a boy he would make the journey to his aunt’s estate sitting sideways on the car seat, his forehead pressed against the cool glass of the window. He had always tried to pinpoint the exact spot where all traces of the city fell away and the trees asserted their domination. He thought there might be a kind of magic in that change, that he could even possess it at the moment of its happening. If he put his hand out the window at just the right time he might even catch it, he believed, like a swift line drive into his baseball glove.

  If the landscape was changing and shedding itself of city elements, then he must be doing the same. But he didn’t know what he had to leave behind or what it meant. Why would his mother always insist it was good for him to spend time at Aunt Rose’s every summer if something didn’t actually happen to him with each going? And why, when she and his father returned weeks later to retrieve him, did she examine him so carefully? Her soft brown eyes would sweep over him from his head to his toes while she smiled and asked him a stream of questions. “Who did you play with? How many fish did you catch? Did you like the books I sent? You didn’t have time to write me more than two letters? Where are your shoes?”

  He would answer, often with many more words than necessary, because he had loved talking to her and because he could feel the warmth of her undivided attention. Her face would glow when she laughed at his stories and when his father placed his straw fedora on Val’s head and it would slip over his eyes. Val would push the hat back on his forehead and keep on talking. What was he revealing to her in his chatter? Had he changed and could she tell? What would he say to her after this summer? This kind of thinking always kept his mind occupied on the long drive, but years later he could see it had been childish. His mother had probably meant the trip was good for him because he would enjoy playing outdoors more in the country, and childless Aunt Rose, who was really Val’s mother’s aunt, had liked having him around. And it had been better for him to be there than running in the streets of Harlem where anything could happen.

  As a teenager he had gone in protest. When he turned sixteen his father had begun to teach him his business. This infused Val with a sense of movement—the motion of people from place to place, of dollars being spent, of product being made and delivered. This movement all sprang from his father’s direction. At times he would figuratively give Val the wheel and allow his son to oversee a project or a delivery. Val liked having people look up to him and do his bidding. After such attention he couldn’t bear the quiet of Mercylands even if he was allowed to have his own friends visit. His mother had cajoled him that last summer, just before he turned eighteen, by saying it would be the last time he had to go.

  And it had been, but not for the reason he’d expected. His parents had said goodbye, left him for his stay at Aunt Rose’s, and never returned. The accident, caused by a speeding fifty-year-old banker crossing the centerline on a curving piece of road, had consumed more than one car and three other lives besides those of his mother and father. He hadn’t known the meaning of the word “grief” but suddenly the patch of Oriental carpet in his aunt’s library where he fell to his knees became his classroom in the ways of loss. He’d tried desperately to reassemble in his mind a picture of his mother’s smile because he couldn’t believe he would never see it again. The faces of both his parents had slipped through his fingers like fog and he’d feared the effect would be permanent.

  But Aunt Rose’s face—her high forehead and translucent eyes the color of strong tea, the same eyes as his mother’s—had steadied him. She’d steered him through the planning of the wakes and then the funeral, but had made it clear he had to be the one to give the directions. He’d been the one to walk behind his parents’ caskets and stand next to Reverend Cooper on a grassy knoll in Woodlawn Cemetery while the minister uttered words that Val guessed were supposed to help.

  “‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”

  Val had thanked all the mourners and left feeling small and alone in the back of the long dark car. It was only later, when it was all over and he and Aunt Rose walked along the tree-lined lanes of Mercylands, that he understood why she had guided him so. At that point she could have stepped in and taken over everything—his money, his father’s businesses. That day she made it clear to him she wasn’t going to do it.

  “Your daddy was no dummy,” she’d said. She had nudged him in the side and winked at him. “You probably know more about what he was doing than any lawyer or anybody else he had working with him. Am I right or wrong?”

  Val had nodded and forced a small laugh. “You’re right.” His father had, in fact, insisted Val come to his office every day after school. He’d talked about numbers, showed Val ledgers, and introduced Val to his employees. But more than anything, he’d stressed to Val the importance of generating income. They lived a certain way only because this money was being made. There was no such thing as infinite supply. If he wanted to maintain his lifestyle, and the fawning preference people gave him, the money had to come in, and from more avenues. It also helped to have many legal entities going to mask their illegal interests, which were often more profitable.

  Once he understood business was no more than a colossal numbers game, just like baseball, Val took to it with the acumen of a born entrepreneur. If he could hold a season’s worth of batting statistics for the Dodgers’ starting lineup in his brain, an accounting ledger would be a sma
ll thing to conquer.

  “I know you have more sense in your head than most boys your age,” Aunt Rose said, and she sighed. She held out her right hand with the fingers splayed like a tiny wing so she could caress the leaves of the shrubs as she walked. “What’s three or four years? The work you have to do will be no different then than it is now. You may as well start doing it.”

  “Yes, Aunt Rose,” he said quietly and stared down the lane in front of him. The world suddenly felt open to him, and empty in a way that invited him to fill it however he pleased. In that moment he understood his childhood interest in the changing landscape and realized such transitions were meaningless. He could move from one world to another with no more effort than it took to walk from room to room. Already he had gone from being his parents’ child to their surviving heir. If any magic did come of such a drastic change, and the many more sure to come, he knew he had to conjure it from his own choice of how he would appear once he stepped into the situation. He was in complete control. Who did he want to be? There must have been something he was on the verge of becoming—that person his mother saw taking shape under her watchful eyes. But he didn’t know who that person was—he couldn’t see himself through her eyes and he couldn’t ask what she’d seen and what had made her smile. It was all lost to him.

  He did know the feeling of walking down the street with his father. It was like they had together formed a great magnet. He could sense heads turning, bodies bending toward them as though he and his father had reconfigured the very air that people breathed and they were compelled to adjust themselves accordingly. He liked how that felt. And if he were forced to admit it, he would say he wanted most to know how it felt to wield that power alone without his father propping him up like he had when he’d taught him how to ride a bike. The thought made him stand straighter as he imagined how he might walk down Lenox Avenue in the coming days.

  As though sensing his thoughts, Aunt Rose had stopped walking and touched his elbow to make him look at her. When he did he saw her face was hard but beaming with so much love he felt he needed to hide. It was too bright for him to stand still in the glare.