The bedtime bell rang. Adele withdrew her hand from the circle of light. “I’m not telling anyone else. Just you.”
“Whatever,” I said.
A week or so later, I walked across the quadrangle on my way back from choir practice—we practiced in the chapel these days, preparing for our ambitious Graduation Week Concert. I was alone as usual; the other girls had gone off in groups, laughing and gossiping.
“Wait!” Sandra Robinson caught up with me. “That sounded pretty good, don’t you think?”
I looked into her smiling face, freckled to the color of a paper bag, and I thought: You are a fool to think you can make me feel at home with kindness. I will never feel at home here.
We walked in silence for a few steps. Dogwood edged the quadrangle like thin smoke. The air was heavy with the smell of new-broken ground. Gardeners had been preparing the flower beds.
“They’ll plant hundreds of pansies,” Sandra Robinson said, sniffing the telltale air.
“I don’t really like pansies,” I said. All those little faces looking at me, all those wide surprised eyes.
“You will when you see these,” Sandra Robinson said, “you’ll love them. It must be something in the ground or the light here. They are just absolutely gorgeous.”
Must you convince me of even that? I thought. Must I agree with everything? Is appreciation of the beauty of pansies part of my education…? I think, perhaps, I hate all flowers.
Ahead of us the dormitory door opened. Light flooded out, flowing toward us like water on a beach.
I stopped. “I’ll tell you a secret, a really serious secret. Adele’s engaged. She slipped out the other night, and Stephen gave her a diamond ring.”
I felt a shiver of pleasure as I broke that confidence. “But you mustn’t tell anyone,” I said. “Not anyone.”
But of course she did.
And of course the nuns soon heard the talk, as they always did. The Sister Superior called Adele’s parents for a conference. And questioned her friends, including me.
“Did you know she left the dormitory?”
“Yes, Sister, I knew. She told me when she showed me the ring.”
Frank. Open. Direct. A minority child like me must be forgiven her sins. The jungle is still close to her. She requires understanding. Her moral code is not fully developed.
“She brought the ring to my room for me to see.”
Sister Lea, called Sister Lesbos among the girls, tapped her fingers on the desk. “You know that what she did was against the rules, do you not? Why did you not come to me? Or to any of the sisters?”
But this was too much. My ever-present imp of the perverse rose up in me with a lion-like roar. I felt a surge of protective feeling for Adele, for those bones wrapped in a skin of my color.
“No, Sister. I could not do that. Not ever.”
“We cannot have you girls running all over the countryside at night.”
“She would be the only one, I think.” I spoke clearly, deferentially stating my opinion. “No one else has the courage. Or perhaps no one else is that much in love.”
She looked at me strangely, curiously, as if I were some exotic zoo specimen she had not seen before. “Yes. Very well,” she said.
Sandra Robinson said, “Why did you tell me about Adele’s ring when you knew it was a secret?”
I looked at the freckled face, earnest and sincere. “I told you not to tell. Why did you?”
She looked upset, and hurt.
“Why did you even listen to me?” I insisted. “Why do you care what us two black folks do?”
She spun away.
In the days that followed, Adele and I behaved with perfect politeness toward each other, though the talk at our table in the dining room was strained and stiff—about the choir or the play (I was helping with the scenery) or the softball team or the new French teacher, Mrs. Delatte, hired after Sister Winifred’s heart attack. And all the while the nuns debated Adele’s punishment.
Finally they were agreed; the school rules were too important; they must not be flaunted or ignored. Adele was expelled.
She came looking for me, of course, and found me at my locker between classes.
“Black nigger bastard,” she shouted down the length of the crowded hall. “I hope you burn in hell.”
I was a little surprised. I had not known she was so religious.
I absorbed her hate like nectar from a flower. I smiled into the shocked faces of the students around me. I smiled at the teachers who came running. I expanded, until I myself filled my universe.
I was no longer invisible. The whole school had looked at me, had seen me, and had to admit that I existed. The students seemed more frightened and bewildered than angry. Around me the dining table was silent. I walked completely alone—to class, to choir practice, to the theater workshop. I was excluded from the Saturday shopping trip. No matter. I ignored them. I pretended that they, in their turn, were invisible.
It did not last long. Soon Sandra Robinson was back at my side, her face indicating understanding and sympathy, kindness and condescension. (I was sixteen years old and I despised it.) Others joined us. I became part of a group; we studied together, six or eight of us, learned tennis, memorized poetry, practiced our beginner’s French. We imagined we were friends; we said so out loud.
Such was my first year at boarding school, an eighth grader, almost two years older than my peers, and light-years apart.
By mid-June I was home. My mother left her job at the department store to work full-time at her own shop. “She finally did it,” David Clark said with a wide proud smile. “I finally talked her into it.” He had gone to the bank with her; he had cosigned the loan.
By mid-July we had moved from our apartment over Leconte’s Drugstore to a house on Maple Street, a double house, one side for us to live in, one side for the workrooms and the showrooms. We took the old sign with us to hang beside the different door: MODISTE.
There were changes, too. My mother still made children’s clothes—there were at least a dozen new designs displayed in her sketchbooks, and her two hired seamstresses worked busily on the steadily increasing orders. But now she also made elaborate clothes for newborns, long christening dresses of lace and silk; bonnets covered with embroidery, buntings of fine transparent wool.
(I held one of the finished caps in my hand, admiring its intricate swirling design of seed pearls. “This could be for a bride.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “I will get to that. In good time.”)
During the year I had been away, she had designed new dresses for me to model, dresses for a sophisticated young woman. (She looked at my hands, picked them up, and turned them over, examining the quick-short nails and the calluses made by the violin strings, then showed me how to bend my fingers—just slightly—to conceal them.) I had always looked older than I was. The sleek understated dresses suited my appearance perfectly. And they sold very well. My mother hired another seamstress.
“Have you noticed?” David Clark said to me. “She is really happy, she has planned this for so very long.”
Yes, I had noticed. In the months I’d been gone, my mother had changed. She was far more at ease now; she moved with the careless grace of a shadow; she spoke easily with her customers, thoughtful, concerned, charming. Before, when I displayed her dresses, I had been the princess and she the invisible presence. Now she’d emerged to stand beside me, as the dowager queen.
She no longer worked on Sunday. (She no longer went to church either.) In the morning—early, she always woke with the first light—she worked in her garden, a two-foot-wide brick-outlined strip along the four sides of the house. She planted impatiens across the front, a crowded mass of pink and white. Along the sides she put a jumble of petunias and daylilies and a few rosebushes and half a dozen violets. In the back, under the kitchen window, was a bed with four cabbages, an edging of parsley, two staked tomato plants, and seven stalks of corn.
She spent all Sund
ay morning weeding and fertilizing, only stopping now and then to sniff the smell of chicken roasting in the oven: that was how she knew when it was done. At ten minutes to twelve David Clark parked his cab in the driveway. He brought a bottle of bourbon and a bag of ice, and he and my mother had a quick drink before dinner. And it was always the same dinner: roast chicken and stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping. After, if the weather was good, we went to the Botanical Gardens in the City Park. In the midsummer afternoon, the flowers seemed diminished, wilted and cringing in the heat. We opened our umbrellas against the sun and walked on, listening to the chattering drip of large fountains whose waters smelled strongly of chlorine. We bought a bag of taffy kisses and another of popcorn as we strolled along the seawall, where there always seemed to be a small breeze, and watched sailboats moving ponderously across a lake of blinding glare. On rainy Sundays we went to the movies. In the dark my mother fell asleep instantly, head held straight, and woke only when David touched her arm. On those rainy days we bought a dozen doughnuts and went home to make a fresh pot of coffee. That was our supper. At seven o’clock my mother began yawning, and David went home to his wife. No matter how much time he spent with us, he always went home at night.
He’d half explained his life to me once. “I got married just before I went overseas in forty-three. I didn’t have any family except my brother, and he was in the army too. I wanted to have somebody to get my allotment check and maybe my insurance. I sure was worth more dead than alive.”
And my mother said, “She is crippled. A disease of the nerves.”
Which was as close as my mother ever got to explaining anything.
In September I returned for my freshman year of high school. My mother packed my clothes as carefully as before, now including the one party dress the school required of all high school students. Mine was peach silk with a wide lace collar and a flowing eight-gore skirt.
The school buildings were the same, as were the playing fields and the gardens and the chapel and the classrooms and the endless echoing halls. Sister Winifred had died of her heart condition, and Mrs. Delatte still taught French. The history department had another teacher, a young woman from town, just out of college, her name was MacIntyre. We called her Miss Mack.
My guardian angel Sandra Robinson was there, once again appearing at my elbow or watching me carefully from a distance. This year she was president of the senior class and editor of the school newspaper, and her talk was about colleges and entrance exams, full scholarships and tuition waivers.
And there were three new black students. We were all freshmen and we shared two double rooms next to each other. In the dining hall, on opening day, Sandra Robinson gathered her four black lambs and settled them at her table. The other chairs filled up with politely smiling girls, filled up so smoothly that I knew the Sister Superior had issued orders.
No matter. I was used to it. I had adjusted. Indeed I had. I could walk these halls and paths and fields with a feeling of assurance, if not of belonging. I did all that the school expected of me. I made friends when I would have preferred to be alone. I sang in the choir; I had an occasional small solo part. I practiced my violin; my callused fingers moved with something like facility across the strings. I learned to play tennis and badminton. During my years at parochial school I had learned basketball; now I played forward on the varsity team. I taught myself to type on one of the unused machines in the Upper School Office. I kept an A average and was on the honors list every quarter; for that I wore a small blue-and-gold bow on the collar of my uniform blouse. I joined the drama club again and worked on the scenery for all the productions. On Saturday mornings—just as we had the previous year—a group of us rode the school van to the Riverdale Shopping Mall. We drank Orange Julius and tested all the counter perfumes and tried on long dangling earrings until the salesclerks grew weary and told us to leave. We ate hamburgers with onions and chili and wiped our greasy mouths delicately, remembering our manners.
I could afford such treats now. I had money in my pocket, mine to spend. With the school’s help, I’d found a job—I produced special invitations for special occasions: bridal showers, birth announcements, luncheons, anniversary parties. Whatever the occasion or the theme, I illustrated it in watercolors and lettered it carefully in script copied from a library book on calligraphy.
Oh yes, I had adjusted. But not everybody had. I lived with an intimate view of misery.
My roommate, whose name was Connie, cried in bed every night. I soon trained my ears to shut out the sound of her sniffles, and I slept peacefully until the morning bell.
Because we were now considered to be young ladies, we were required to learn social grace and polish. On the first Sunday of every month, the high school held afternoon tea. The parlors were decorated with flowers and shiny-leafed bay branches. Linen and silver emerged from the housekeeper’s locked closets. We girls put on our party dresses and our high heels and added light touches of makeup. (Perfume was still not allowed.) All sorts of people were invited; the rooms were always crowded. Benefactors of the school. Alumnae and their husbands. Businesspeople from town. Local priests. Missionaries on their soul-saving way somewhere else. Teaching brothers from St. Dominic’s College just across the valley. Visiting parents. Journalists. Writers. Professors from the state university. Politicians discreetly campaigning for reelection. And always, each time, boys from one of the neighboring schools. Sometimes they wore gray military uniforms (imitations of West Point), sometimes the embossed blazers of a Catholic school, sometimes the tweed jackets of a non-sectarian one.
There was hot tea, and fruit punch made with iced tea, and cookies and little sandwiches with vegetable fillings. There was music too; Miss Ellison from the music department played piano medleys of all the Broadway shows. We circled the rooms, chatting politely for two hours, while the senior girls checked our manners and poise.
I never understood why the boys came. Perhaps they were required to appear.
I know that I enjoyed those afternoons. In my lovely dress, with my hair brushed straight down my back, I moved with a model’s slow deliberation. (“You look like you’re sleepwalking,” a girl whispered to me.)
The older people talked to me seriously, the professors especially. I had learned to ask questions to cover my ignorance. One kind man, with a bald head and fuzzy eyebrows, introduced me to topological algebra between bites of watercress sandwich. Another explained to me the value of computer modelling in economics. Sandra Robinson, always at my elbow, urged, “Talk to the boys. Just go up to any of them and start a conversation. Try it.”
When I finished my turn at the punch bowl, fifteen minutes of ladling pinkish liquid into imitation cut-glass cups, I singled out a tall thin brown-haired boy. “Is this your first visit to St. Catherine’s?”
“I came once last year.” He was wearing a tweed jacket and a navy tie. The shirt collar was too small for him, I noticed; he had left the top button open.
“I wasn’t in high school last year,” I said, “so I couldn’t come.”
“Does that make you a baby?” He smiled; he had good strong teeth, the sort you see in toothpaste ads.
I walked over to an open window. He followed. We leaned against the sill and talked. He was a sophomore at Milton Academy, he said. He played the clarinet and had spent the summer at music camp in Michigan. “What did you do last summer?”
“I’m a model,” I said quietly. And liked the way it sounded.
“Yeah?” He seemed impressed. “How long have you been doing that?”
“All my life.”
“How about that. You like school here?”
“I have to go to school someplace.”
He laughed, a short hard snort. “You’re so right.”
Miss Ellison was playing “Some Enchanted Evening.” On the piano a bouquet of flowers shivered; a dahlia dropped to the polished wood. The copper-colored petals looked like red hair. Like the head of a very small Anne Boleyn,
I thought, and was pleased by my allusion. I must use it in an English paper sometime soon.
“You going to the game Friday?”
“What game?”
“You don’t know? You sure you really are in high school? Baldwin, that’s last year’s state AAA champion, is going to play St. Aloysius. And the thing about it is that St. Aloysius this year has the coach who was at Baldwin last year. Now do you see?”
What game are they playing? I wondered, but I didn’t ask. I just nodded.
“So are you going?”
“I might. Maybe.”
“There’ll be plenty of car pools from here—but you’re only a freshman, so I guess you didn’t know that.”
I sat back on the windowsill. Across the room Sandra Robinson’s eyes watched me. “I suppose I will go.”
“I’ll look for you. Buy you a Coke at halftime.”
“Yes,” I said.
So. I had arrived. As soon as possible I would tell my friends. They would be jealous, I thought.
I participated. And I smiled. But I said very little.
“Don’t you ever talk?” someone asked me.
I shrugged. A girls’ school is a constant babble of voices, laughing, simpering, whining, complaining voices. Even silent prayers in chapel were a shrieking gabbling demanding din to ruffle the ears of the Almighty.
“She has a philosophical mind,” Sandra Robinson answered for me. She had appeared, as she always did, from nowhere. “She considers things carefully.…Look now, little one, why don’t you join us after dinner tonight? There’s a group of us’d be glad to see you.”
It was a great compliment, an invitation to join the intellectual elite of the school. I smiled my thanks, and truly meant it; I so enjoyed being praised for my intelligence. It is a weakness of mine, then as now. I am quite aware of it, though I make no attempt to correct it.
The evening discussion group was Sandra Robinson’s idea, begun three years before. After dinner, when the kitchen staff had cleared the tables, ten or fifteen girls, mostly seniors, gathered in one corner, feet propped on chairs, elbows planted firmly on tabletops—attitudes strictly forbidden during meals. For an hour or so, between the departure of the kitchen staff and the arrival of the night janitors with their heavy cleaning equipment, the dining room was ours to lounge and talk. The upperclassmen. And me.
Roadwalkers Page 18