He had been at Mercylands nearly a week and he figured now would be the right time to encounter Elizabeth Townsend alone. He waited because at lunch she didn’t say what she would do while he and his aunt were upstairs. Whatever she chose to do, he wanted to give her the chance to settle into the activity, let enough time pass so he could join her in a manner that seemed as innocent as possible.
But if she remained in her room—which was likely given the hot weather—then he would have to figure out how to cross paths with her.
Sebastian knocked softly and entered.
“Sir, Mrs. Townsend has been on the terrace for the past half hour. She’s reading.”
Val removed his glove, tucked the ball inside it, and handed it to Sebastian. He put his feet down but sat a moment longer looking out the window. “What’s she reading?”
“Not sure.” Sebastian examined the glove, turning it over and over. “Annie, her maid, said she brought the book down from her room. Do you need this oiled, sir?”
“No, it’s fine.” He grinned. Sebastian noticed everything. “And thanks.”
He liked that he and Elizabeth would be outside in broad daylight. The book, whatever it was, would provide a safe, convenient opening for conversation. He stood, went over to the valet stand, and removed the short-sleeved red shirt he’d hung there earlier. He put it on and straightened the collar around his neck. He started to button it but, after another glance in the mirror, decided to leave the shirt open. He put his hands in his pockets, considered his reflection, and decided he looked casual enough. Sebastian opened the door and Val walked out.
THROUGH THE DRAWING room windows he could see Elizabeth Townsend on the terrace with a tray of glasses and a large pitcher of lemonade on the table in front of her. She sat so far back into her chair’s cushions she was nearly reclining. She wore a light dress with a blue-and-white gingham-checked print. Her slim legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched out from underneath her skirt, and her feet, Val was delighted to see, were bare. Her sandals sat a few inches in front of her, where they must have landed when she kicked them off.
“Hello,” she said when he stepped through the French doors. She smiled and put her hand up to her forehead as though to shield her eyes from the sun. “How was the game?”
He shrugged. “Good, it’s over,” he lied. “Dodgers won,” he guessed. He smiled and pointed to the empty seat across the table from her. “May I join you?”
She sat up, her forefinger still marking the place in her book. She used a foot to pull her sandals toward her but, he noticed, she didn’t put them on. “Yes, of course.” She waved over the chair with her book-free hand.
“Whew! Hot out here.” He grinned and flapped the sides of his unbuttoned shirt before he sat down.
“Oh, I don’t mind. I hate being cold. To me this is heavenly.”
He nodded, but said nothing.
“What about you?” she asked. Her eyes crinkled at the edges and she wriggled her nose. “Does the heat bother you?”
“Me? Remember, I like baseball. Baseball is nothing if it’s not standing around under the hot sun. It’s the best part.”
She laughed. Good, he thought. Good.
He pulled the pitcher of lemonade toward him and poured a glass. He offered it to her, but she shook her head. “I don’t think my aunt expected it to get this hot so soon.”
“Is she all right?” She bit her lip slightly and he liked the way the soft flesh reddened under her teeth.
“Oh yeah, she’s used to days like this. She’s resting, probably with every window open and a fan blowing on her.”
“And I guess if it’s going to be hot, better to be here than in Harlem. It’s so beautiful here.” She looked out across the lawn and his eyes followed her. The bottle-green blades shimmered in the afternoon light.
“I’ll drink to that.” He raised the glass of lemonade and winked at her. She shifted in her seat and looked down at the book in her hand.
“Whatcha got there?” He took a long drink and swallowed. “From my aunt’s library?”
“No, I brought it with me. It’s a novel. The Street by Ann Petry.”
He nodded and leaned closer as though he wanted to see the book’s cover. “What’s it about?”
She handed him the book. “A woman living on 116th Street. She’s alone and trying to raise her little boy all by herself.”
“You mean like right now?” He examined the cover. On the top-left corner a drawing of a woman’s head with thick red lips and blue-black hair stretched across the book’s spine and cover so only half her face appeared on the front.
Elizabeth nodded. “Well, yes, it is contemporary.”
“In Harlem?”
She nodded again.
“Then why read it?” He slid the book across the table back to her, then took another long pull of his lemonade.
She looked confused, which caused a deep V line at the top of her nose, just between her eyebrows. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Why read a book when you can see that story yourself every day, from the moment you set foot out your door?”
“It’s not just about the story.” She shifted again in her seat and one of her hands floated up to scratch her forehead. “It’s a statement about the way we live.”
“You live like that, do you? On 116th Street?” He smiled and savored the chance to tease her.
“Well, no. But people we know do. People who come to our church do.”
“You don’t know what you think about the way we live?” He leaned toward her and nearly winked again, but thought better of it and didn’t.
“I do know, but it’s good to see how someone else sees things. Don’t you agree?” She tilted her head to the right. This made her unruly curls drop over her left eye and she pulled them back.
He shrugged. Why should he care about what some writer had to say about streets he knew as well as or even better than she did? A person only had to open their eyes, see what’s going on, and then decide what they were going to do or not do. He wrote checks when he felt like it. He stepped aside, too, when it was none of his business. Why would you have to wait for someone else’s words?
But the way she looked at him made him feel like he was once again at a table, across from his mother, on one of the many times she had summoned him from playing outside. She would make him sit down then push the book she’d been reading across the table until it was square under his nose. One day it would be Marcus Garvey. On another day it might be Zora Neale Hurston, or some lines from a poem by Langston Hughes.
“Look at that, Val,” she’d say. “What do you think of what Mr. Hughes wrote here?”
He had thought he would make sure he was never in a situation where anyone could tell him where to sit. But instead he read quietly and told his mother his thoughts on the book until he had assured her he knew that he, too, was America.
Elizabeth was still talking, now about someone named Lutie. “But it’s all connected. It’s all connected to the world at large.” He realized she was talking about the character in the book. “Her loneliness echoes the abandonment of every single woman in the world. Her son is the face of every hungry child.”
He put his elbow up on the table, held his glass in front of him, and gestured toward her with it. “Maybe so, but I can’t be concerned with the world beyond my influence. That kind of thinking can drive you crazy. Puts you in a place of always trying to do more than you can—you try to do the impossible, solve everyone’s problems.” He drained the glass, put it down, then leaned back in his chair as though he’d made his point and done it well.
She folded her hands on top of the book on the table and leaned toward him. “Forgive me for saying so, Mr. Jackson, but you don’t seem concerned with any aspect of the world, whether you have influence in it or not.”
Something inside him froze, like a bag of ice lodged in his abdomen. He knew he should look away from her and defuse the moment, but he couldn’t move. He star
ed straight into her eyes. “That’s because the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn about what happens to Negroes, let alone Negroes in Harlem. If they want to know anything it’s where we are, so they can run the other way.”
This wasn’t the kind of talk he thought he would have with her. He wanted to go back to the weather, or discuss the pattern on her pretty dress, or tell her a story about falling off the terrace when he was twelve. He would rather talk about anything else. But with each statement he couldn’t help himself. The words wanted to stand on her proving ground and they spilled out of him like prisoners from a jailbreak. He was going too far, revealing too much.
If this were a conversation with Mae she would have sensed her dominance by now and would be looking for the first opportunity to crush him. But then he would better know how to handle such talk with Mae. It would be easier. She would operate from ego, which meant he would have some chance of defending himself by poking at the slight openings in her ego where he might find her vulnerable. He would know when he had found the spot by the look in her eyes, blank and cold like a closed window. Then he could reach inside, grasp the heart of her false belief, and shred it with his fingers.
But Elizabeth spoke from passion and true belief, not ego. He could only stare, knowing that if he didn’t move away soon he would be cut to ribbons by the gleaming sharp edges of her words.
“What if we are the ones who need to give a damn?” she asked. Her right hand moved to her chest, her fingertips touching the small bones at the base of her throat. “Everything that’s happened these past twenty years—the stock market crash, the Depression, the war. Some people might say Harlem reflects all of it. I say it’s the other way around. Harlem was a part of making it all happen.”
“I don’t get what you’re saying.” And he really didn’t. But that didn’t stop him from pushing on. He kept his eyes level and forced his tone to stay as even as he could make it. “Last I checked no Negro was given any say about whether or not we went to war. Most don’t own stocks so we had nothing to do with the market collapse, and a colored child going hungry didn’t start a breadline.”
Her hands opened like birds taking wing, like she would grasp the whole sky in her palms. She looked at him with widened eyes. “What we do matters. How we think matters. How do we know it didn’t all happen because of the way we went about our own lives? That countries aren’t more willing to go to war because drunk men in one of your clubs are willing to pull guns on each other? That children aren’t starving because of the way we starve ourselves?”
Her look unnerved him and he made a swift decision. It might be better to let her keep talking. “So you tell me, Mrs. Townsend.” He lifted his chin like he was inviting a right hook to the jaw. “Where do I come in?”
It was the wrong thing. His tone was a shade too careless, and a little too cool. His words yanked her by the heartstrings and she reared up from the table as though she had wings on her back. Her face glowed like she would spit fire.
“You breathe!” she insisted, her hands on her hips. “Don’t you?” Her head tilted toward him like her right ear wanted to yank the answer out of him. “You have a brain that can put two and two together. You have eyes to see. I say if Miss Petry can make us care about this one lonely woman who isn’t even real maybe someone will be more willing to help an actual person. And that could improve a family, then an apartment building, then maybe a neighborhood.”
He shook his head. She wasn’t yelling but the way she spoke she seemed to think what she was saying was the most obvious thing in the world and she was downright bewildered that he didn’t know it already. He wanted to duck underneath the table, but not because he was afraid of her. What he was feeling was worse, much worse, because it twisted his stomach inside him like a wrung-out washcloth—he was ashamed.
“Yes, Mr. Jackson, you see what I’m getting at now.” She touched an index finger to the table and tapped it as she slowly enunciated her words. “Eventually we can change the world. I do believe that. I have every faith in it. For you to think like that is shortsighted. The world won’t always be the way it is now. My husband works like a crazy man to bring on that day of change. And until it comes it is up to every individual to be a citizen of this world, not just the Negro community, because that is exactly what we are.”
She was done with him. Even before she bent down to pick up her shoes, hooking her fingers around the heel straps, he could tell she was done with him. Her voice rang with the finality of a church bell at the end of a service. He should have gotten up too, he knew that, and he even moved his hands to push himself up out of the chair. But in her bare feet she moved lightly, quickly, and before he knew it she had stepped through the French doors and was gone.
He leaned back and let his head drop down over the top of his chair so he could consider the clouds drifting above him. It was a safe place to direct his gaze. If he focused on the table he knew he would grab a glass and smash it on the terrace floor. The book too still lay on the table. The half-faced woman’s eye on the spine stared back at him. He wanted to throw it through the French doors, into the house. But instead he needed to think about why he wanted to act like this in the first place. What had she done to him?
They’d slipped too quickly out of polite conversation—he hadn’t been ready for the turn of the tide. And he was caught off guard by the chance to voice thoughts that, he assumed, had no place to go before. His crowd didn’t sit around discussing books or social issues. She had surprised him and whenever he found himself unprepared he always thought the best thing to do was tell the truth. It would be the easiest thing to remember if the words got thrown back at him later. But he wasn’t sure himself about this truth and didn’t know if he wanted her handling it.
He sat up and shook his head hard to clear it. He was thinking too much about what happened, about the argument itself. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and concentrated on his fingers as he interlaced them in front of him. What had he seen? She was confident, and strong—much stronger than he’d thought she would be. That wasn’t a problem; he’d had strong women before. But he sensed something extra in Elizabeth, like a complex set of tumblers that might not allow him to unlock her.
Then he felt it—doubt formed like a small dark cloud on the table before him. It seemed to spread across the top and was so thick and persistent that it made him get up and jog down the terrace steps to get away from it. He continued walking across the lawn and thinking. He refused to doubt he could have Elizabeth Townsend, refused to believe some aspect of her would be impregnable to him. He was sure he just had to adjust his tactics.
The sun bore down on his bare head and he pulled his shirt off. He went back to his main observation—she was strong. And yet how had he been approaching her? Cautiously, he thought. Figuratively, he was stepping toward her as though she were a bird on a limb, hoping to coax her from her branch and onto his finger. He saw now how wrong this was—and how unlike him. Wasn’t it always a losing proposition when a team entered a championship game and tried to play in a way other than what got them there in the first place? He had been doing the same—playing to lose. He would have to engage her on his terms, his way. And strike repeatedly.
He came to a bed of flowers that looked like daisies with dark pink petals. He pulled one toward him, wrapping the thin stem around his right index finger until the tip turned white. But was he right about this? How would she respond? He decided he would have to test her somehow, even before he planned anything else. He needed to see if he could ignite some physical sensation in her, and in turn unsettle the mind she obviously controlled well. Her response would tell him how to make the next move and the one after that. He tugged the flower and snapped it off from its stem. He let it drop to the ground and he crushed it underfoot as he turned to walk back to the house.
CHAPTER 14
Elizabeth
Mercylands, June 1947
Elizabeth knew from the sweat beading on her for
ehead underneath her straw hat it must be well over 80 degrees. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, but she and Rose had decided this would be the coolest part of the day to cut some flowers. Her friend sat on a low canvas seat just within reach of the largest dahlias. Elizabeth, wearing long leather gloves to protect her from the thorns, stood near her cutting roses. They placed their choices in large buckets of water. She dabbed her cheek with the back of her gloved hand and checked to see how Rose was faring in the heat. She wore a short-sleeved shift made of pale blue cotton, her arms bare because, she told Elizabeth, she still had faith the sun would do what it was supposed to do and tan her up nice. Indeed, the browning of her sun-kissed arms lent a look of health to her parchment-thin skin. Anyone who didn’t know her might easily think this vibrant woman was a good ten to fifteen years younger than she was. Rose laughed that way. Her eyes sparkled that way. Her cheeks bloomed that way. Elizabeth hoped she would look so well in her seventies.
She liked this woman. She enjoyed the slow, well-considered nature of their activities—sitting with Rose doing needlework, cutting flowers as they did now, talking about books. Rose looked up at Elizabeth and smiled. Elizabeth hadn’t told her about being on the terrace with Val two days before. Maybe because she didn’t have words for what had happened. It hadn’t exactly been a fight—more like a disagreement, she figured. She knew she was impatient with certain topics.
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