“I know Jackie Robinson is a great man. But why do you admire him so much? Especially a man with your . . .” Elizabeth ran a hand through her hair and looked away.
“My reputation?”
She coughed again. “Yes.”
Val didn’t move. His stare remained. “Look, I used to think character was a commodity,” he said. “I thought as long as I had money, I could be as evil as I wanted to be. It didn’t seem to matter and nobody seemed to care. Now Jackie Robinson, he showed me I was wrong. It doesn’t matter how much money he makes, but who he is is everything! He’s got to be good and he’s got to be a good man. Why? Because it’s gonna mean something for our people long after we’re dead and gone. Ain’t no amount of money can buy meaning. No amount.”
He picked up his paper again. Elizabeth realized she could let him disappear behind it and he would leave her alone. But knowing this only made her feel bolder and she advanced. She sat back and crossed her legs, hoping to assume his same casual attitude.
“I saw you with those boys this morning.”
“Yeah?” He put the paper down. “And you didn’t even defend me in front of Aunt Rose just now. But how did you know?”
Elizabeth reached for the coffeepot and refilled her cup. It gave her an excuse not to look at him. “I followed you.”
“Followed me?” Val laughed. “Oh, Mrs. Townsend, you better be careful! People are gonna talk!”
“I was just curious.”
“About what?”
Elizabeth stayed silent and stirred her coffee, unsure of how to answer.
“Looks like Aunt Rose isn’t the only one with a dirty mind!”
“I wanted to know if you were really as terrible as people say. I had to know for myself, only now I don’t know what to think. The man I saw out there with those boys didn’t look heartless or mean.”
“Heartless and mean? Okay, let me solve the mystery for you.” Val sat up and leaned toward her. “I won’t lie—I’ve been living out of bounds. I run with a rough crowd and we only see people as prospects and victims. But now I’m trying to get up from all of that. I’m trying to follow somebody’s good example and it’s getting all messed up by people telling you lies and nosing in on my business. Who’s been doing that anyway?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“So you’ve said.” Val got up, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked over to the windows.
Again, Elizabeth couldn’t resist the question in her mind. “Whose example?”
“What?”
“You said you were following somebody’s good example. Who is it?”
“Oh, you’re gonna keep nosing around in my business too?”
Elizabeth smiled. “Well, yes.”
Val turned around to face her. He took his hands from his pockets, pulled his chin up, and looked directly into her eyes. “All right then. It’s you.”
Elizabeth thought she had stopped breathing. She had nothing—no words, no motion. She was anchored to the chair and her eyes locked to his.
“You asked. I’ve told you.” He spoke in quick, calm words. “I won’t lie. I’ve lied my whole life. But I see truth in you all the time. I see you sweating in that church basement, feeding those people, giving them love, inspiring love, being an angel. I want to be like that. I want to master that kind of emotion. I want to be like you. I love you.”
Suddenly he moved and the table was no longer between them. He was on her side, reaching toward her, grabbing her hands, and holding her tightly.
“And I can’t do a damn thing about it. Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything you say. Please, baby, just tell me what to do. I need you.”
She pulled back. Would she have to fight him? Would she have the strength?
The phone rang.
Its echo and subsequent rings filled the air above them, dissolving a spell.
“That’s my husband.”
Val backed up, his eyes never leaving her face. He would let her go, but she would have to move. Elizabeth got to her feet and wobbled for a moment, her right foot turned inward. She knew if she could turn her head, if she could stop looking at him, she would be able to walk, to leave. Her eyes found the wallpaper behind him, and she allowed her view to be swung by the pattern of printed flowers and trailing vines. She followed the green vines to help her head turn and then used them to lead her to the door and out of the room.
WHEN SHE HAD gone Val walked around the table again, back to his chair. He looked out the windows and took another sip from his coffee cup. Darkness began to fill the room, and Sebastian came in and turned on a lamp.
“Is there anything else I can get for you tonight, sir?”
“Yeah.” Val nodded slowly. “Find out who’s been bad-mouthing me to Mrs. Townsend.”
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER 20
Cecily
Harlem, June 1947
When she and Sam sat together at the piano, Cecily felt as though the different parts of her that didn’t make sense came together all at once. She was whole and, for once, absolutely herself. She knew she would be able to give him the words she hadn’t been able to share with anyone else, and she knew without question he would understand. Cecily didn’t know how this could be, but she was happy, happy in a way she had not felt for a very long time. He even helped her shape time differently so they mastered the minutes of their company. Cecily found with Sam time didn’t move too slowly or too fast—in a certain way time didn’t matter because she didn’t care what would happen in the next day or even the next hour.
He had seemed so hesitant during their first lesson. He barely looked at Cecily when he spoke and he stood over her pointing at the music instead of sitting with her. She thought it was because he didn’t really want to teach her, that he was acting as a favor for Mae. He asked her about her musical knowledge and she felt silly admitting she sang in church, but only when she could mimic the good voice of someone behind her or near her in a neighboring pew. She didn’t know how to find the notes on her own.
“That’s not bad,” Sam said. “It means you have a good ear.” He took a piece of paper from his briefcase and, using the piano as his desk, drew on it a set of lines and a series of black dots on sticks. Then he marked each dot with a capital letter.
“Here are the note names for a treble clef staff,” he told her. “Let’s start with that.”
Cecily looked at the paper then put it up on the stand in front of her on the piano. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
Sam cleared his throat. “Miss Cecily, you have to put your hands on the keys. This way.”
“Oh!”
He placed her fingers over the keys and pointed out middle C. Then he pointed to the dots on the paper. “That’s this note here. Your fingers cover the keys like this. Here’s how you do the first part of the scale.”
Sam’s fingers, curved and strong, met Cecily’s and tapped over the keys in a tiny dance.
“Let’s just do the right hand for now. You try it.”
She touched the keys softly, and the sound from the piano emerged just as quietly. Suddenly she needed more thought to make her fingers move independently of each other, but soon they did in an awkward clawlike motion where one finger seemed determined to high-step over the others. She managed to strike one key after another and she could hear the partial scale expressed beneath her fingers. She looked up at Sam and smiled.
He stepped back as though stunned. Then he nodded.
“Yes, that’s it. Here.” He came around the piano and perched on the edge of the bench. Cecily slid over to make room for him.
He took hold of Cecily’s right hand and she felt a shift like a tiny spinning wheel in the bottom of her stomach. His hands felt impossibly soft and she wanted her fingers to stay there, warm and enveloped like under the blankets in bed. She smelled the starch in his shirt mingled with a dash of a spicy cologne. The scent seemed to awaken her, just as the porter on the train to Anselm had done
all those months ago, to tell her she had arrived—and not arrived at any old place, but at home.
Sam shaped her fingers and moved them in his own so she could get a feel for how she should touch the keys.
She worried about Mama and how she could easily crush this feeling and break Cecily up into little unknown pieces again like when she had taken her back from Anselm. But she tried not to think too much about that possibility nor did she trouble herself with what she and Sam could become. She only cared about the golden hour they shared each week sitting next to each other. She carried the little slip of paper he had secretly given her tucked into an inner fold of her pocketbook. In moments when Mama was occupied, Cecily would take out the paper and read it over and over.
Cecily,
From now on whenever I sing, I sing for you. I love you.
Sam
This paper should have sparked so many questions in her: What did it mean? What could they do? Would they ever be together? And those times when the week wore on and she did not have the opportunity to read the words as much as she wanted, these questions did needle her. But then Thursday would come and they would sit at the piano and all of the questions fell away. Sometimes she could even enjoy the lesson and pay attention to what he was telling her. But usually she was working to hear what he couldn’t tell her, looking for messages he might try to pass to her. Her playing suffered for it, she knew, but that was all right. She practiced more during the week.
Dear Sam,
I just want to keep saying thank you—I want to write it over and over again all over this paper. I love you, Sam! I will work hard, I will become a good piano player because I don’t want to give Mama cause to send you away. Please let me know what else I can do for you. You make me feel like I can do anything.
Yours truly,
Cecily
After each practice Sam would write out a list for her of what she had to study that week. One day when she opened her book to practice, she found two sheets of paper instead of one. The one was her list. The other taught her what it meant to feel delight.
O Cecily!
Did you know your name feels like a song on my lips? I sing it every day and I thought I was a happy man. I thought it was enough. But now I know you love me and my cup runneth over. What can we do? The way I see it, we can only take what God gives us for now. You keep being you, I’ll keep being me. We’ll find our way, I just know it. Write to me again.
Your Sam
Their lessons changed after that letter. He brought her beautiful music, even if it was beyond her capabilities, so he could play it for her. They would begin with Cecily’s scales and exercises to keep Mama from being suspicious. Then quietly Sam would begin a song and whisper the words to Cecily as though he were wrapping each lyric in a cloud and presenting it to her as a delicate gift. On the day he sang “Nature Boy,” Cecily’s heart broke and re-formed, broke and re-formed, over and over until he was done. The song seemed like a secret, one that explained the world to her with a single line:
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.
How far had the boy gone to learn this? “Very far,” the song said. Cecily counted herself lucky because Sam came to her each week to deliver this message and prove its truth to her.
Their letters continued. She slipped her letters into his coat pocket—Sam was careful to hand his coat to her before Gideon got his hands on it. He would leave his letters for her between the pages of her music books in her piano bench. Mama praised her eagerness to practice when really Cecily tore through her materials in search of his handwritten sheets.
Dear Cecily,
Did you wonder why I acted so strangely at our first lesson? I was afraid! You have this light in your eyes, did you know that? It’s like you’re seeing everything in the world for the very first time! I didn’t know what I would look like with that light shining on me—I was scared of how you would see me. You might think I’m just some shiftless club singer moonlighting at your church. Or worse—someone trying to take advantage of you, someone not to be trusted. But when I finally got the nerve to look in your face—damn! So much trust and honesty in your sweet face! I realized all I had to do was be the man you deserve and you would see it—you would see me with all your beautiful mercy and grace. And I knew I could do that. You fill me with such hope. Do you know that?
Until next week,
Sam
Dear Sam,
All this time I thought I was doing something wrong! I was embarrassed because I didn’t know what I was doing and I thought you’d tell Mama she was wasting her money. I don’t know what to say about all you write. I see things with my eyes, just like anyone else. But you do feel familiar to me, like I’ve been waiting for you. Does that sound crazy? I just know Mama wouldn’t understand. How can we make her understand? Maybe we should wait until she knows you better to tell her about us? But what do we tell her? We have to be careful, she’s always watching us, even when she’s acting like she’s not.
You make me feel like I did when I lived in Anselm with my aunt and uncle. I felt like I knew my own mind there, and my aunt Pearl treated me like I did too. Maybe life just moved slower there and I had time to think about things and take it all in. Here nothing makes sense and everyone moves too fast for me. I feel stupid—I can never catch up. But you slow time down for me. You make me feel like life is fine—it’s going to be all right. And it will, won’t it?
I love you,
Cecily
For all their writing, though, it was that first small note Cecily reread the most. It was easy to conceal so she carried it with her. The longer letters she returned to the piano bench, but the first note was her touchstone, the proof that told her the reality of Sam’s love. Knowing he loved her, she could tolerate going all over the city with Mama for dance lessons and shopping and boring tea parties during which she couldn’t keep herself from yawning. If at the end of the day she could pull out that slip of paper and read it again, she knew she could do anything. Sam sustained her, helped her hold her head up and walk the way she thought a woman might walk.
Yet her heart ached, because she couldn’t say her love out loud. She thought her chest would burst with the joy and sorrow welling up within her. She yearned for a friend with whom she could sit and whisper or laugh. This someone could read Sam’s letters with her and say whether they both decoded the same meaning from his words. She could then tell Cecily what to write in her own letters so she could reassure Sam with every word she committed to ink. Cecily missed her aunt Pearl. She missed their talks at the kitchen table as they worked their hands through mounds of dough, or in the backyard folding sheets freshly dried off the clothesline. She wanted to ask Aunt Pearl if one day Sam would tell her the same story over and over again, like Uncle Menard did with Aunt Pearl. Would Cecily be able to laugh with such joy each time he did? She didn’t know the answer, but she did know she was more than willing to learn it.
When she read his letters, Cecily pictured Sam, his fingers folded around the pen, and how he must sit hunched over the paper, same as her, and line by line, how he wrote her and their love into being. She wondered if it was the same for a painter watching a scene come to life out of the colors underneath his brush. It must be the same kind of magic, exactly the same. How else could she feel so divine, so created herself?
Was this what Mama always feared, that someone like Sam would come along and re-create Cecily into a person Mama didn’t know? But how much was creation and how much was this Cecily already changing? Was this what becoming a woman really meant? Because it seemed to her Mama kept looking for the little girl in Cecily, and Cecily was having a harder and harder time locating that child herself. When had she put down her Ruthie doll and forgotten to pick her up again? When had she stopped thinking about penny candy, and how long she could hold a lemon mint in her mouth before it melted on her tongue? And when had the fairy-tale prince stepped out of her childho
od books and taken the shape of Sam Delany? Sometimes it seemed it happened over the course of years. Sometimes it seemed it all happened with a single breath. But it didn’t matter because there was no turning back. She had stepped through a door and heard the echo of it closing firmly behind her.
CHAPTER 21
Mae
Harlem, June 1947
Mae paused on the steps outside the Vaughn brownstone and listened. Cecily would be in the middle of her piano lesson with Sam and Mae knew the next set of notes floating through the parlor window would tell her how far the teacher and his pupil had progressed. If she heard some insipid childish music she would know Cecily was still immaturely banging away and Sam was carelessly letting her do it. If she heard anything resembling a real tune she would know Sam was being respectful and dutiful—but not what Mae needed him to be.
If, however, she heard “Nature Boy,” even if it was just one line, Sam was better than she had given him credit for, because it meant he was actively, furtively pursuing Cecily. Whether the silly girl knew it or not would be another matter, but Mae wouldn’t worry about that just yet. She knew to ignore the hard spot on her heart, the part of her that didn’t want Sam to play the song, couldn’t bear the thought of his light directed so wastefully. It thumped in a way she found distasteful, even shameful, because she had no use for it. She dispensed the unwanted energy by tapping the stone stoop rail impatiently with the palm of her hand. Mae didn’t like having to depend on the actions of others. One person, at most two, could be moved as she pleased. Any more than that and she had to spread out her chances and gamble on what they might do on their own.
Val should have accommodated her; it was as simple as that. The disappointment he had caused struck deep, shockingly so. But she wasn’t ready to cut it off with Val—not yet. She needed him to come back to her.
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