WHEN NOBLE arrived, he kissed Macon gently, holding her close in the hallway before entering the living room. To her surprise, she did not resist him, but felt oddly relieved by the assertiveness of his touch.
She told him about the ransacking of the BSU offices, saying, “You know what frightens me most? Young people did this. Kids. I think I could handle it better if I knew adult Klansmen had done it. But if kids did this, what happens to the idea of each generation being an improvement over the one that preceded it? What am I doing in the classroom? What are any of us doing there?”
“Racism is a virus,” Noble told her with a weary shake of his head. “And since nobody’s really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.”
Noble was working as a consultant at a black think tank in downtown Washington, conducting research on shifts in black voting patterns in the last decade. He’d had a particularly rough day, he told her. “I’m not a desk man, somebody to sit in front of a computer and punch in statistics, graphs and all that. With Josh, I was his front man, the arm twister, the person who rallied the troops to reach into their pockets and pull out their checkbooks. I’m restless and bored doing research. And they know it.”
Macon made Noble a rum and Coke and fixed herself a mug of herbal tea. They watched the late news. When Macon turned the television off, Noble told her, “You know my parole ends soon.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you almost sound sad.”
“In a way I am.”
“You’ll miss being on parole?”
“I’ll miss my parole officer.”
“You’re kidding!” Macon exclaimed.
“No, I’m serious,” Noble said, folding his hands behind his head, stretching his legs out before him. “He’s a righteous dude. Righteous. Remember when we used to say that?” Noble winked at Macon. “He never made me feel like shit because I blew it. He just faced me man to man. Something my dad never did.”
“Your father’s a minister, what do you expect?”
“Yeah, it’s been rough all these years mainly because he’s never been my father, he’s always been my minister,” Noble said bitterly.
“And your parole officer?”
“I guess what I mean is—” Noble began.
“He forgave you.”
“Yeah.”
“The way your father hasn’t.”
“The way I’m scared he never will.”
“You’re his son. He knows that.”
“Hell, I learned how to raise money, grease palms, how to soak the rich and the poor watching my daddy pastor a church.” The words were vintage Noble-easy, enticing, only half true.
“Are you saying there’s no difference between what you did for Fairbanks and what your father did in the name of God?”
“I wish I could, Macon. But even I’m not that bold,” he admitted.
“Of course you are,” Macon said.
“Can I be that bold tonight? Will you let me?” Noble asked softly, reaching across the length of the sofa, pulling her close to him. “I don’t feel like being a gentleman,” he whispered in her ear. “And, Macon, I don’t want you to be a lady.”
As soon as they walked into her bedroom, Macon turned off the lights, but Noble quickly turned on the lamp beside her bed. He unbuttoned her blouse, his fingers nimble and quick, as Macon stared at a corner of the room, afraid to look at his eyes when he saw her chest. He gently pushed the blouse over her shoulders and kissed her on her neck, whispering, “Relax, please, don’t fight me, not now.”
His plea was so deep, so real, that Macon gave in. She rested her arms on his shoulders as he unfastened her bra in the back. The prosthesis came off easily, and Noble laid it on the bed beside them. He kissed her there, kissed her there first, on the place where she had thought for so long that she was empty. Dead. Noble made tiny circles of kisses around the place where her breast had been and then gazed up at Macon and kissed her eyes, stalling the onslaught of tears. They lay in her bed for a long time Noble simply running his hands over her body, caressing her. When Macon reached for him, Noble said, “No, wait, let me make love to you.”
Beneath his touch she was renewed, her body a continent he joyously discovered. Later, lying in his arms, Macon asked quietly, “Does it matter to you?”
“Not one bit,” he said, letting his hand again rest there and gently fondle her. “One day it won’t matter to you either,” he assured her.
“Noble, I want to live,” she sighed. “I want to live a long time.”
“So do I, Macon, so do I.”
THE LOW RESTLESS rumble of Edwin Braithwaite’s snores woke Pearl from a fitful, unsatisfying sleep. Her leading man lay on his side, his body bunched like a fist. She was always surprised to wake up beside her lovers. Not once had she succeeded in erasing the memory of their touch, or the surprise of the morning after. But she kept trying.
Fatigued from a nearly sleepless night, she rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. The play was in its last week in Washington; the run that had been extended earlier by two weeks. On tour for six months, Pearl wanted nothing more than to go back to New York. To go home. After Saturday night she would be free.
Pearl played the role of Wilhemena Grace. In the course of the play, her character aged from twenty to fifty-five. She was in virtually every scene, and she delivered a ten-minute monologue at the play’s conclusion. Some nights after the play she could not sleep, her willful alter ego, much as she did in the play, refusing to release her grip on anyone who owed her allegiance, loyalty or love. But Wilhemena Grace had not haunted her sleep last night. Pearl had only dreamed about her father, as she had every night since his stroke.
“JESSIE, JESSIE, is that you?” Olive Foster had shouted into the phone, as though she were talking to her daughter across an ocean or a universe. Pearl had been in a hotel room in Philadelphia, three hours before an evening performance, when the call came.
“Yes, it’s me, Mama.” She knew her mother’s voice. How could she forget it? She had spent most of her life wondering why this voice had not roused itself in her defense. She knew her mother’s voice.
“Your daddy’s took sick. Real sick,” Olive blurted out quickly. “Had a stroke two days ago. He’s in a coma. And it don’t look good.”
Pearl felt no relief, no sadness. She had no idea what to say. Mae Ann had kept Pearl informed of the hypertension, arthritis, then an attack of paralysis that virtually crippled Chester Foster in the last several years.
“You still there, Jessie?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m here.”
“Mae Ann was gonna call you, but I begged her to let me do it. I told her it was my place to tell you. You may not want me to be, but I am still your mama.”
“What do the doctors say?” Jessie asked, as she nervously turned on the television and saw the taut, lean bodies of several basketball players fill the screen.
“Say we just have to wait and see if he comes out of the coma. He’s been real sick a long time.”
“Mae Ann told me.”
“Was you mad at me too, Jessie? I know he hurt you. But you been mad at me all this time too? That why you never called or wrote, why you treat me like I’m less than a stranger?”
Pearl didn’t say a word. She could barely breathe.
“Wasn’t nothing I could do, Jessie.”
“Mama, there’s always something you can do. Something,” she said, finding her voice.
“You gonna come home to see him?”
“Mama, I’m in the middle of a tour. I have a show to do every night. I can’t just leave in the middle of a tour.”
“Not less he dies. They’ll let you come home then, won’t they? You saying you can’t come home till your father’s dead. The man who gave you life.”
“The man who raped me.”
Her mother’s startled sharp intake of breath whistled in Pearl’s ear.
“He’s dying, Jessie, he ain’t got long. You got
to forgive.”
“Why do I have to forgive, Mama? Tell me why? He raped me.”
It had taken years of sporadic, wrenching therapy for her to say the word. Pearl had hungered for the catharsis she had mastered on the stage to infiltrate her life. She went through four therapists to find one she thought she might be able to trust one day. The therapy sessions were worse, she concluded, than anything her father had done to her. Initially she approached the sessions as a drama in which she skillfully masked the truth, her powers of deception hard won and polished from years of practice. Only when the therapist threatened to end the sessions, to in effect “fire” her as a client, did Pearl begin to peel off the layers.
Knowledge carved her up. Healing hurt as much as being sick. If before she had wanted to die because of her childhood, now she longed for death because she understood too well the woman she had become. A new, fiery language took shape in her mind, took hold of her life and refused to let go.
Anger was intoxicating, it left her exhilarated, but in the end it offered no peace. But anger had introduced her to the proper names, the correct designations. Anger settled quite effectively some scores and she said again, “Mama, he raped me.”
“Hush, girl, don’t be saying that.”
“What do you want me to call it, Mama? Give me a word to use instead.”
“I shoulda knowd,” Olive said wearily, “shoulda knowd you couldn’t forgive. He’s had his punishment. God made him pay.”
Her mother was preaching again. Olive Foster was an assistant pastor at a storefront Evangelical church whose zealous young pastor had spotted Olive on a downtown street corner one afternoon, a Bible open to Timothy, her shrill, yearning voice halting passersby with its promise of redemption and eternal love. Reverend Cane Montgomery had marveled at the small crowd gathered around the stout, elderly woman whose vigorous pronouncements of the Word were rooted, he could tell, in a shame so deep it threatened to be everlasting.
But to Pearl, her mother’s faith was a smoke screen, denying Olive Foster full entry into the region of her own specific pain.
“Did you ever wonder why I had to pay too, Mama?” Pearl asked, her voice breaking. “Why do you want to steal from me what I have a right to feel? I paid too. Mama, I’ve got to go now. Call me and tell me when I can come home. Call me and tell me when it’ll finally be safe.”
——
CHESTER FOSTER died at ten minutes after four, just as Pearl was walking on stage for a final curtain call during the Saturday matinee performance. The only witness to his death was his wife, who sat beside his bed as he silently slipped away. When he seemed no longer to be breathing, Olive Foster lifted her husband’s wrist and felt for a pulse. She placed her ear against his chest and heard no heartbeat, then she gently closed his eyelids. She sat back down in the chair beside his bed and looked, for what she hoped would be the last time, at the tubes taped along Chester Foster’s arms, the tubes running from his nose. His skin was withered, gray. The thick head of hair he had cherished as a younger man had begun falling out years before. Paralysis had deformed the muscles in his arms and hands so that his upper body resembled a twisted tree, split and shuddering with age. As Olive folded her hands in prayer, the only sound in the room was the hum of the television perched overhead. When she opened her eyes again, she gazed at her husband, thinking of the people she would now have to call, the plans she would have to make for the funeral. The first person she would call when she got home was Jessie.
THE PLAY HAD ended at ten-thirty and Pearl had fled immediately to her dressing room where she had locked the door and sat before the dressing table shivering with remorse and grief. She had chosen to go on, to perform, despite the call from her mother two hours before the curtain went up—the call that informed Pearl her father was dead.
Pearl usually used the period just before going on stage to rest, or to read something unrelated to the play. Sometimes she meditated. But no matter how she chose to use them, those hours were considered sacred.
The call lasted no more than five minutes. Her mother told her she could come home now, that the funeral would be Monday afternoon, that her father had died peacefully. Pearl promised she would come for the funeral, promised to leave Sunday night from Washington.
She had not once considered not going on, had told no one about the call. She was a professional and had performed her role without a hitch.
The party to celebrate the end of the tour was in full swing when she arrived at Macon’s house.
“So they’ll get off with a slap on the wrist, and a mandatory class in Race Relations 101,” Pearl heard Macon say, as she neared the fireplace where Macon stood with Noble and Hilton Butler. Noble Carson’s arm possessively circled Macon’s waist, and he was nursing a drink in his other hand.
“I wouldn’t call it a slap on the wrist,” Hilton protested, shifting uncomfortably. “The group will have all activities suspended for the rest of the year. And why would you demean a course you recommended we create?”
“Hilton, they didn’t just ransack an office. They destroyed the trust those students had in the university, its ability to speak for and protect them.”
“I agree. How can I deny what you’re saying? But there’s only so much we can do. The president’s office isn’t a prosecutorial body and this order came straight from him.”
“Macon thinks the university is special,” Noble said, hugging her affectionately. “Like a black kid should have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being called nigger on the average campus.”
Macon spotted Pearl and pulled her close, disengaging herself from Noble’s hold and hugging her friend. Then she introduced Pearl to Hilton. Noble, who’d met Pearl earlier, kissed her lightly on the cheek, saying, “You sure we can’t get that play extended again?”
“I love D.C., the audiences are great. But, Noble, I’m ready to go home,” Pearl sighed.
Several people surrounded Pearl, complimenting her on her performance. She stood in their midst, a smile on her face, her hands clammy and cold, and answered their questions as though walking through a dream. Behind her Noble and Macon were engaged in a vigorous, though friendly disagreement with Hilton. Pearl saw Edwin enter the room and he waved to her. She smiled at him, hoping he would rescue her.
Edwin expertly waded through the crowd and reached for Pearl’s hand, apologizing as he claimed her.
“This is my leading lady, folks,” he laughed gently. “We have to say our good-byes.”
As they danced, Edwin told Pearl, “I’ll miss you.” Then he looked at her closer and said, “Damn, I know I’m good but those tears aren’t for me are they?”
In response, Pearl buried her head in his chest. The hours spent in his bed or hers after making love, talking about the progress of their careers, cast members, best and worst experiences on the road, had meant so much. Edwin, whose fierce talent, keen features and tawny complexion had kept him modeling and then acting since he was eight, gave her advice as they lay wrapped in the sheets switching channels on the room’s huge TV, ordering room service.
“You’re an actor,” he told her, “but don’t think like one. Set up some kind of retirement plan.” He told her how to invest her money the next time she got a windfall. “You won’t always be young and pretty,” he joked. “Act like that day is a month away instead of more years than you can imagine. Get some other kind of skill, anything so you’ll be prepared for the day when black actresses who look and sound like you aren’t in style anymore.”
They had begun flirting in Chicago, had become lovers in Boston, had fought in Baltimore and had made up in Washington.
“I’ll miss you too,” she told him, thinking only of her father.
“I don’t know what’s wrong, Pearl, but whatever it is, it’s not tougher than you are. You want me to take you back to the hotel?” He felt her trembling in his arms.
“No, Edwin, I’m okay. Really, I’m fine,” she said, grateful the song was now
over. Edwin hugged her one last time and when she turned to walk away from him she bumped into Macon.
For the first time that evening Macon looked closely at Pearl and she knew something was wrong. Reaching for Pearl’s hand she led her upstairs to her bedroom. Closing the door, watching Pearl slump heavily onto the bed, Macon asked, “When did he die?”
Since Pearl had told her about her father’s stroke, Macon had watched the changes in her, the tenseness, the anxiety. What had informed her so certainly of what had happened was the absence of all this in Pearl’s demeanor. Sullen, sad resignation had replaced the anguish.
“Earlier today. I got the call from my mother before I went on.”
“And the funeral?”
“It’s Monday.”
“You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m going. You know, after I hung up with her, I went to the mirror in the bathroom and I looked at my face and I saw how much I look like him. Macon, I look just like him.”
“Pearl, I don’t know what to say.”
“You know, I always thought it was from him that I got my love of acting.” This thought suddenly seemed too much for Pearl and she rose from the bed and walked over to the window. “When he was in a good mood at night, before we all went to bed, he’d sometimes tell us stories.” An icy, bewildered smile suddenly appeared on her face. “Brer Rabbit and those kinds of stories. He’d be five, six different characters. He could change voices, expressions, everything. We all loved him so much then. When he was pretending to be somebody else.” Pearl stopped. Then to Macon’s amazement, she went on. “And he loved taking us to the movies with him and we’d sit up in the balcony in the dark. I think I got my drinking from him too,” she said, her voice trailing off into a bitter whisper. “Most times he was drunk when he bothered me. When I got older, he’d make me drink with him, before it happened.”
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