Wherever There Is Light
Page 8
To keep her claustrophobia at bay, Kendall left her door open, which made it impossible for her to pretend she was out when Garland dropped by to enumerate her shortcomings, adding to a list that she was certain her mother had been compiling since becoming pregnant with her. “I’d like to speak with you” was the gambit Garland used after rapping on the doorframe, and this afternoon was no exception.
Kendall swiveled around in her desk chair. “How you feeling, Mama?”
“Not well.” Garland set her briefcase on the floor and sat on the bed, the room so narrow that her knees nearly touched her daughter’s. “Why aren’t you studying?”
“Just about to.” The real answer was that she’d been too busy imagining herself walking arm in arm with Julian through Greenwich Village and meeting John Sloan and Dodd Brigham.
Garland was silent, gathering herself. Then: “Do I have to explain your history to you? Our family’s history.”
“You’ve done that already. Lots of times.”
Kendall’s eyes wandered to her paintings, and Garland wanted to slap her, thinking that at least it would get her daughter’s attention.
“Grandpa worked hard, I’ve worked hard, and your rejecting that to go paint—it’s more than I can say grace over. How you going to support yourself? I won’t give you a dime.”
“I don’t want your money. I’ve been working since I was fourteen and saved up from every job I ever had. If I’m careful in New York, I have enough for a couple of years. If I need more, I’ll find work. I know Grandpa would want me to try.”
“Not if he was your father, he wouldn’t. And getting him to change his mind was about as easy as sticking your head up your hind parts and reciting the Gettysburg Address in pig Latin. Nohow would he put up with a daughter of his running off to New York.”
“I’m not running off.”
“Your grandfather used to say that a colored man has to be twice as good to go half as far. And I can tell you it’s worse for a colored girl.”
“Does the past have to be my future?”
“You don’t change the past by taking up with a white man. Some white men would like nothing better than to take a rich, good-looking colored girl up North and pass her off as white.”
Calmly, Kendall said, “I know I’m not white. And if I forget, they’s lots of nearby folks to remind me.”
“That’s God’s own truth, so I suppose I taught you a thing or two. And here’s something else. White people don’t have a clue what it is to be a colored. Not one damn clue.”
Kendall was not as calm as she appeared. Her time with Julian had been wondrous. When they’d finished making love, Kendall was sore, and Julian had drawn her a bath, sprinkling in bath salts that made the water as redolent as the air after a thunderstorm. As she soaked he changed the blood-spotted sheets, then brought her a terry-cloth robe, which he’d warmed up in a tumble dryer, and when they were done drinking another glass of wine, her soreness was gone, and they got into bed, and he rubbed her with baby oil. Then he was kissing her—everywhere—until she couldn’t take it anymore, and this time there was no pain, just their pushing against each other until someone who sounded exactly like Kendall started singing a scat song with the refrain, Fjul-uck-jul-jul-ian-ian, and she shuddered as the tension began to leave her in long, slow beats. But the next day, as Kendall ate breakfast with her sorority sisters in the hotel coffee shop, she was distressed by Julian’s failure to see the people on Ocean Drive gaping at them with revulsion. And though Kendall ached to be with Julian now, that didn’t mean Garland was without wisdom; one reason her mother was so vexing: she frequently knew what she was talking about.
Garland said, “Where do you come to a boy like Julian? I swear you got ahold of the only Jew who drinks.”
“Mama!”
“Don’t ‘Mama’ me. I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body. But Kendall, our family’s made a name for itself, and we did it when white folks thought we should be doing for them. What’s his family got?”
“His father’s a professor—”
“Without a nickel to his name. The mother grew up in an orphanage and their son ran away to become a moonshiner. Like Jarvis Scales. Not even a high-school diploma. This boy Julian’s not good enough for you. He’s got nothing but the ability to forget his place.”
“Jesus, God, you’re talkin’ like one of those Main-Line white ladies Grandpa couldn’t stand.”
“You’re not hearing me because you’re like a man now—a person more interested in what’s happening in his drawers than his head.”
They laughed, both of them embarrassed. Save for the facts-of-life talk Garland had given Kendall years ago, it was the frankest conversation about sex she’d had with her daughter.
Garland wagged an index finger at Kendall. “Don’t you bring me any of those zebra babies. No black-and-white stripes, you hear?”
“I hear.”
Garland had calculated that by now she’d be furious. Yet her fury had deserted her, leaving her so sad she couldn’t bear it. In a searing flash of memory, she recalled Ezekiel sitting in his rocker with Kendall on his lap as he read to her from an illustrated book of fairy tales, and Garland became so enraged at her father and daughter that she had to retreat from the parlor.
“I have to go,” Garland said, then picked up her briefcase and walked out of the room.
Chapter 14
On a hot May morning, a week before her daughter graduated from Lovewood, Garland stopped her station wagon outside a storage barn, and she and Elana loaded up the car with a shipment from Sears, Roebuck—towels, gauze, bars of soap, boxes of cornstarch, and bottles of calamine lotion. Elana had ordered and paid for the supplies because in March an outbreak of measles had swept through the shacks of the tenant farmers, and Elana wanted to be prepared if it happened again. Last evening, a farmer had informed Garland that some children had rashes.
When Garland learned that Elana had acquired nursing skills at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, she asked her to help care for the farm families. There were only two Negro physicians for all of Broward County, and they drove hundreds of miles of unpaved roads to make house calls and oversaw Provident Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, the one local facility that accepted colored patients. So Elana sewed up gashes and sterilized wounds, dispensed aspirin, and assisted Hazee Thomas, who, when she wasn’t at her juke, was a midwife. Owing to a lack of iodine in their diet, the elderly developed goiters, and Elana made sure they ate enough table salt. She preached that cleanliness was not just next to godliness, it could prevent family or neighbors from taking sick; and she sang the praises of Coke syrup for nausea and castor oil for almost anything else: add two tablespoons of it to a cup of warm milk to get rid of tapeworms; heat some in a saucepan and rub it into arthritic joints to alleviate pain, or below the belly of a woman cramped up with her monthly.
Garland said, “We don’t pay your husband enough for you to buy supplies. Please send me the bill.”
“They weren’t expensive.” Elana had used some of the money that Julian had given her, but she didn’t want to tell Garland. From her phone conversations with her son, Elana concluded that Julian was involved with Kendall, and apparently Garland didn’t approve, because she had complained to Elana that on a few occasions she hadn’t been able to find her daughter on weekends.
On the stream bank down from the shacks, boys and girls spotted with measles were taking turns in the metal washtubs. The water was cloudy from the cornstarch Elana poured in to relieve itching. Mothers were bathing their children, but thirty kids were milling around whining and scratching themselves, and the tubs had to be emptied and refilled after each use, so Elana pitched in. Dabbing the children’s rashes with a washcloth flooded her with a joy she hadn’t felt since Julian was a child, and as she rubbed a bar of Lux soap on a boy’s chest, she remembered bathing her son, and a Yiddish term of endearment slipped out of her mouth.
“Is that good, bubbeleh?” she asked.
 
; The boy pouted. “I ain’t bubbewho’s-it. I be Talbert.”
“I apologize, Talbert.”
Grown-ups had gathered on the bank, all of them watching Elana bathe Talbert and dry him off with one of the new towels. The dark faces watched Elana with a wariness that baffled her, and later, in the station wagon, she asked Garland if she had offended her audience.
“They were in shock. Negro women wash white children. You bathing a colored child is news. White women down here think they’re above that.”
“I was a week old when my mother or father left me on the steps of an orphanage in a box. Who in this world do you imagine I feel better than?”
Garland brought a picnic lunch when they visited the farmers, saying that it was the least she could do, but Elana, intimately acquainted with loneliness, recognized a fellow traveler. Today they picnicked on a hilltop from where they could see the ocean beyond the campus with its palms standing like swaybacked sentinels among the brick rectangles of buildings and vibrant plantings of flowers.
Garland said, “When Daddy saw this view, he told me he was going to build the prettiest college anyone’s ever seen.”
“And he did.”
“I did. He watched.”
“Did he live to see it?”
“He only passed four years ago. Around the time Kendall started here.” Ezekiel had spent his final month reading the King James Bible. Garland was astounded: save for her wedding, she’d never seen him in a church. Spotting her astonishment, Ezekiel sighed. “I been tryin’ to forgive that peckerwood Scales who sold my mother. Can’t forgive that man nohow.” Garland said, “Don’t trouble yourself about it, Daddy.” Ezekiel lay back on his pillows. “Ain’t rightly clear why, but it done took all the willpower God give me not to poison the highfalutin Philadelphia trash that ate my food. If I hadn’t had to take care of you, I sure nuff woulda done it.”
Elana said, “Did you always want to run a college?”
“Wasn’t raised to want for myself.”
“All the good you’ve done—for the students and the farm families.”
“The families I do for my mother.”
“You’ve never mentioned her.”
Garland retreated into a glum silence as they ate slices of ham folded into buttered biscuits and drank sweet tea from Mason jars. Ever since she and Elana had started visiting the tenant farmers, she’d been tempted to tell her about Ezekiel and her mother, certain that an orphan would appreciate her feelings. Yet Garland had never been one to cultivate close friendships. She was mortified by her father’s behavior and loath to admit her mortification to a stranger, let alone a refugee Jew who could’ve passed for a Protestant daughter of the Main Line and who rekindled Garland’s envy of those Penn coeds in all their ethereal beauty.
Garland stretched forward and rubbed her left ankle.
“You hurt yourself,” Elana said.
“Twisted it, back by the stream.”
“Here, let me.”
Garland hesitated, then moved her hand.
Elana, scooping some ice cubes from the cooler, folded them into a napkin and pressed it against Garland’s ankle.
Garland gazed off toward the college. “My mother was a young girl—poor, illiterate—that Daddy got pregnant, and after I was born, he sent her away. I do for those farm families, it’s like I’m making up for what Daddy done.”
Garland turned toward Elana, expecting to see traces of pity or contempt on her face, but all she saw were blue eyes wide with curiosity and compassion. “I told Kendall, but that girl doesn’t believe a thing I say. Ask her, she’d swear her granddaddy invented starlight.”
Elana could feel Garland looking at her as if she were expected to tell her a secret in return. Elana didn’t mind, but which one should she tell her? That after Theodor completed his yearlong tour of America and they went to Berlin with their new baby, her husband brought less ardor to their bed than he did to their Sunday strolls on Unter den Linden, leaving Elana with a throbbing in her back, a yearning for the rapture that she had once thought was every wife’s reward, and a bottomless guilt about her own desires? That she became infatuated with men she didn’t know—shopkeepers, trolley-car conductors, policemen, any man who even glanced at her as she passed him on the sidewalk? That in the mornings after Theodor left for the university, she daydreamed about these men and touched herself until the clenching and unclenching of her body wrung the gloominess from her and she was able to face the day? That her loneliness had once become so unendurable she had taken barbiturates with a glass of Kirschwasser?
The sexual content of her confession would have embarrassed Elana and, she sensed, Garland as well, so Elana said, “Six years ago, the Nazis burned twenty thousand books because the writers were declared enemies of the Reich. It was in the square by the Opera House and the University of Berlin. The first three volumes of Theodor’s work on the Enlightenment were in that bonfire, and we saw the students and the Brownshirts celebrating. Theodor cried until we got home. By that point, Julian had been in the States for several years. Theodor hadn’t mentioned his name. Or shed a tear for him. He had tears for his books but none for his child. After that night, I could take care of my husband, but loving him? That was beyond me.”
Garland stared at Elana, her face expressionless. Elana was growing uncomfortable with the silence when Garland surprised her by reaching over to squeeze her hand, hard, and said, in a voice tinged with sadness, “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”
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PART III
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Chapter 15
SEPTEMBER 6, 1939
Five days after Hitler sent his Wehrmacht to invade Poland, three days after Britain and France declared war on Germany, and one day after the United States announced that it would remain neutral was the happiest day of Julian Rose’s life.
On that Wednesday afternoon, with the blare and beat of Manhattan in his ears, Julian stood outside the Greyhound terminal as Kendall, in a royal-blue dress with a ruffled lace collar and her hair knotted in an intricate bun, stepped off a bus and into his arms.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” she said.
Julian couldn’t believe it either. She’d spent the summer keeping a promise to Garland, helping to reorganize the library, which gave her mother two more months to talk her out of going north. Since her first night with Julian in Miami Beach, Kendall had only seen him three times: a chaste Sunday in Washington, DC, bunched in with seventy thousand people—several hundred of them from Lovewood College—to hear Marian Anderson sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; and two less modest Saturday visits to the Jerusalem Hotel.
As Julian put Kendall’s three suitcases in the back seat of the Packard, she went to a newsstand and bought the Herald Tribune, Journal-American, the Times, the World-Telegram, and the Sun.
“Where do you want to live?” Julian asked, driving toward the Lincoln Tunnel.
Kendall had the Trib opened to the rental listings. “Greenwich Village.”
Julian was considering telling her that landlords downtown weren’t renowned for their desire to rent to Negroes when Kendall said, “I’m not going to Harlem. It might as well be Lovewood’s Coontown. And I’m done riding in the back of the bus.”
“I could help you find a place. In the Village.”
She rested her hand on his leg. “I want to do it alone.”
“Why?”
“I want to know I can take care of myself.”
“That’s overrated.”
“Only if you already know it.”
Julian said, “Wanna stop for something to eat?”
“You’re not in a hurry to get me to your apartment?”
“Yes, but I was being a gentleman.”
Kendall pressed a hand against his thigh. “That’s overrated.”
Julian lived in a two-bedroom on the top floor of his modern, buff-brick apartment building, and Kendall hardly had a cha
nce to notice the pearl-gray wallpaper dappled with miniature claret bouquets in the sunken living room before she was kissing him. In anticipation of Kendall’s arrival, he had purchased a bed with a fawn-colored brocaded headboard and azure satin sheets from Bamberger’s, the fanciest department store in Newark. The aesthetic appeal of the sheets was undeniable, yet as Kendall and Julian, naked now, enlaced themselves on the satin, they kept slipping away from each other until Julian, turning to retrieve a condom from the night table, slid off the bed, which started them both giggling.
Julian stripped back the sheets, then sat on the cotton mattress pad holding a Trojan and spotted an unfamiliar eagerness in Kendall’s eyes as she lay looking up at him. Maybe it was that she no longer had to worry about exams or her mother bird-dogging her, but Kendall seemed completely at ease and surprised Julian by taking the condom from him, rolling it on, pulling him on top of her, and raising her legs to ease his way.
Neither of them questioned the change just then, nor afterward, under the steaming spray in the tiled shower stall, while Julian rubbed Kendall with a washcloth and determined, somewhere in midscrub, that her breasts needed some attention from his mouth. With her breath quickening, Kendall lathered up Julian with a bar of Palmolive, and when they finished, both of them were panting and the hot water was gone.
Temporarily satisfied, they got dressed and strolled through Meadowland Park behind the apartment house, past swans gliding across the lake, and stopped at the public library, where Julian checked out a copy of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, and Kendall was delighted to find Taos Pueblo, a collection of photographs by Ansel Adams. Julian carried the books under his arm and held Kendall’s hand as they walked by the shops on South Orange Avenue. No one gaped at them, Kendall observed, though she didn’t see any Negroes other than a handful of women in maid’s uniforms coming out of the grocery store or wheeling baby carriages.