by Peter Golden
This, Kendall realized, was her dilemma—her fear that the yearning at the center of her, a yearning that had been with her forever, would die if she married Julian, and she would cease to be an artist. Taking photographs, capturing glimpses of the life around her, was the one thing that she needed more than him, and to lose it would be to lose herself.
Kendall wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, so there was no relief from her sadness, just a terrible pressure behind her eyes as she took a pad and fountain pen from her satchel:
My Dearest Julian: I think I have loved you ever since I saw you at my mother’s dinner party so many years ago. I’m sitting here wishing that I was someone else, someone who would not have to write this note. I’m honored beyond words that you want to marry me. But I can’t marry anyone and remain who I am. I can love you, though, love you always, love you for the rest of a life that I can scarcely imagine without you.
That was all she had the strength to write. Maybe she would add more in the morning, an apology, a clearer explanation. Then she would seal the letter in an envelope with her plane ticket and mail it to Julian.
The air was too cold now to keep the window open, and Kendall closed it and gazed down at the square, where the benches were empty and leaves floated on the dark water of the fountain.
* * *
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PART VI
* * *
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Chapter 54
MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA
FEBRUARY 7, 1952
Four years. Over four years since Julian had heard from Kendall. It had been too long and, he discovered one morning, not long enough.
“Hello, Julian?”
He lay in bed with the phone in his hand and tom-toms beating queasy rhythms in his head. Last evening, he’d had dinner at the Forge with a guy raising capital to build the world’s swankiest hotel on Miami Beach. The guy had a flair for ordering cognac—a blessing at night, a curse in the morning.
“Julian, it’s Kendall.”
He was tempted to hang up except he missed hearing her voice—the muted southern melody, the sharp edges, the intelligence, the whispers and sighs.
“Hi,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Lovewood. I called Fiona. She told me you were staying at the Saxony.”
“That woman runs her own CIA.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“At Fiona or you?”
Kendall laughed, a soft, doleful sound. “I meant Fiona, but—”
“I’m not mad.” That was true in Fiona’s case. He had supper with her and Eddie twice a week, both of them pushing him to find a wife, but mostly Fiona, who said, “It’ll be a snap. You’re the most eligible yid in New Jersey and the state’s got more temples than Israel.” Julian dated and nothing lasted. His anger at Kendall had melted away, yet he still had difficulty thinking of her without sorrow, without asking himself if there was something he could’ve done to make it work out, and his inability to answer that question irked him.
“You’re down here for a while?”
Julian heard it in her tone: she had a request, and he imagined replying—You’re on your own, kiddo. Even as he formulated that petty riposte, Julian knew that the words would never come out of his mouth. Love erodes or hides or curdles to rage, but it doesn’t go away. It etches itself into your heart, permeates the muscle, survives in the blood.
“Until this afternoon. My plane’s at three thirty.”
“Could—could you take a ride to Lovewood before the airport?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Mama’s sick.”
“I’m—”
“She’s dying.”
His anger, his sorrow, an urge to see her, another urge to take an earlier flight home battled inside him. “I’ll be there by eleven.”
“I’ll meet you by grandpa’s statue. And Julian—thank you.”
Garland Wakefield sat on the yellow-and-white poppy-print couch in the parlor with her heart, kidneys, and eyesight failing, the result of her being too busy to watch her diet, test her blood sugar with a lancet, and inject herself with insulin. Even though Garland hadn’t been to her office since she’d fainted behind her desk on Christmas Day, every morning she demanded that her nurse help her hot-comb her white hair into a bob and dress for work. Then she’d sit on the couch until the nurse helped her back upstairs for her nap.
Kendall said, “I made some tea for you.”
“You can’t drink tea without sugar—it’ll kill you. And if you’re done talking to your boyfriend, can we talk?”
“Julian’s not—”
“Diabetes doesn’t make you deaf. I could hear you in the kitchen.”
Kendall pulled the cane-backed recliner close to the couch so her mother could see her.
Garland said, “I’ve hired a dean from Fisk and another from Spellman to run the college. Two men to take the job of one woman—that should about do. But you’re on the board now, and you have to attend those meetings twice a year.”
“I will.”
“The board’s got distinguished folks from Afro-American Insurance, the Negro Business League, the United Negro College Fund, the NAACP. You better read those financial statements or you won’t be able to tell pig slop from pizza.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“If I had my way, you’d give up your hobby—”
“My hobby?” Kendall was looking at the wicker table beside the couch, where Garland had arranged her oeuvre between bookends. She even had her latest, Paris in the Dark, a pictorial guide to postwar nightlife.
“Don’t go arguing semantics—it puts wax in my ears. All’s I’m saying is you should quit scurrying around like a sprayed roach and come home like your friend Simon.”
Garland had saved issues of the Courier for Kendall. Simon and his new wife were the toast of Negro society in Pittsburgh, and Simon had become the executive editor of the newspaper. Kendall didn’t envy Simon’s life, but she was stung that her mother would show her the papers, another of Garland’s not-too-subtle critiques of her choices. Kendall almost retaliated by telling her about Simon and Thayer and how Julian had saved Simon. She chose not to because ever since arriving from Paris, Kendall had begun to mourn the only mother that she would ever have. One of them had to end their war and Garland didn’t seem inclined to declare a truce.
“All’s I mean,” Garland said, “is if you were here, I could teach you about running a college.”
“That would be nice.”
In her more resentful and grief-laden moments, Kendall believed that she’d learned the lessons her mother had intended to teach her: trust no one; dedicate your life to your work; embrace your loneliness as a badge of honor, as unassailable evidence that you are your own woman, that you belong to no one but yourself.
“And this is important,” Garland said. “My will states that you are the one person who can sell any Wakefield property. I don’t want you to, but who knows what’ll happen without me as president. If you have to sell some, not one acre to Jarvis Scales. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“Not a blade of grass to any Scales.”
Garland stared across the parlor. She didn’t appear to be seeing anything. As if she were in her casket, Kendall thought, and grief tied a knot in her stomach.
“Your grandfather didn’t want me to fetch and carry for white folks.”
“Grandpa was born a slave. Why would he want his daughter to work for his former masters?”
“No, that wasn’t it. He didn’t want me doing for others because it would’ve interfered with my doing for him.”
Garland’s eyes were wet. Kendall sat next to her on the couch.
“Who told him to send my mother away?”
Kendall held one of Garland’s hands in both of hers.
“You think I wanted to grow up without my mother? Or marry your father? I hardly knew the man. But Ezekiel Kendall, he say, ‘Jump,’ I say, ‘How high, Daddy?’ I did everything he ask
; you do nothing I say. Don’t hardly seem fair.”
“I—”
“Who made you so damn free?”
“You did, Mama.”
Garland rested her head on Kendall’s shoulder. “Can’t swear I did it on purpose.”
Julian and the bronze likeness of Ezekiel Kendall watched the students cross the campus as if gliding on the sunlit wind, and Julian wondered if Ezekiel felt as old as he did. His surrealistic musing, so out of a character for Julian, was a welcome distraction from his nervousness about seeing the statue’s granddaughter walk toward them. Her curves seemed more lush, and Julian pondered how it was that Kendall could transform a plain, shell-pink cotton dress into a ball gown simply by wearing it.
“You’re staring,” Kendall said with a weak grin, a reference to their old game.
“Always.”
They looked at each other, uncomfortably, for neither of them knew the appropriate move. Kendall solved the dilemma with French cheek kisses.
“How’s your mom?”
“Napping.”
“No, I—”
“Doc Franklin says a day, a week, or a month.”
They strolled past the chapel, looking at the kids walking with books under their arms.
“How’d you and Abe do with the Kefauver Committee?” For over a year, Senator Estes Kefauver had investigated organized crime. The hearings were televised, and if you didn’t own a TV, you could watch them for free in movie theaters. Abe had been asked about bootlegging and his reputation as the “Al Capone of New Jersey.” He’d been polite and charming and lied about his current gambling interests, and after he was excused, Julian knew that the government wouldn’t stop hunting Abe.
“They covered the hearings in Paris?”
“In the Trib.”
“Jesus.”
“Bad?”
“They say over thirty million people watched. My name kept coming up—if I ever have kids, my name’ll be a curse to them—but the committee has nothing on me or I would’ve had to testify.”
“Give Abe my regards.”
“I will.” Julian had been wondering why Kendall had phoned him. He doubted she wanted to renew their relationship, and even if she did, he wasn’t eager for her to hurt him again. Julian had come to Lovewood in a taxi, which he was paying to wait by the front gate, and if Kendall wasn’t going to tell him why he was here, he was content to chitchat until he had to leave for the airport. He said, “Paris in the Dark was great.”
“Thanks. With all the Americans coming over, it’s outsold my other three books combined.”
“The photos of Dans le Vent were terrific. So it worked out for Isabella?”
“It has. And Marcel. Otis plays the club once in a while, but he’s a big deal now. His quartet was part of a show at the Salle Pleyel. Three thousand people were there, and after Otis did two encores, the audience shouted for more.”
They were going up a path through scrub brush toward the sand dunes and the ocean. Julian felt older than he had standing with Ezekiel. Kendall had taken him up here to this private spot after he’d bought her the Leica. Before Greenwich Village and Paris. Before the war. Before everything. When Julian and Kendall were young.
“I sold some photographs to Life,” Kendall said. “Of families around Saigon. I went to see how they’re coping with the fighting.”
“Congratulations.” What about our family, Julian thought angrily, the family we’ll never have? He became even angrier at the top of the path. Off to their right was the whitewashed shed, the darkroom that Simon had built. Julian had no interest in seeing it again and decided that he was done with chitchat. “Kendall, why’d you call me?”
She stood with her back against a palm tree, looking past him. “I told myself I wanted to say I was sorry. Except I did that already. It was selfish dragging you up here. Maybe I called because I’ve been disappointing my mother forever and now that I’m going to lose her, I’ll never be the daughter she wanted. I’ve been thinking that’s what I was meant to do. Disappoint people and lose them. And maybe I called because . . . I don’t know why. I just needed to see you.”
She met his eyes, and there was such an agonized look on her face that he was frightened for her. It was an agony beyond sadness, more terrible, like flaws in a diamond, deep and irreparable. She whispered to him, and Julian couldn’t believe what he heard.
“Please,” she said.
Her agony was the last thing Julian saw before she kissed him and he closed his eyes. Had either of them spoken as they sank to the sand, they would’ve asked themselves what the hell they were doing. But they were too eager for a reprieve from the present, too willing to believe that eros unbound was a curative for regret and loss, all the while knowing as they labored that it was a temporary journey, illogical and insufficient, which didn’t stop either of them, and when Julian heard Kendall cry out, he let himself go, feeling so empty, he wondered if anything could ever fill him again.
They opened their eyes, their breathing slowed, and Julian stood and helped her up. They straightened their clothes without looking at each other. Kendall took his hand, and they walked to campus. Two students, a couple also holding hands, were startled by the sight of them and performed a comical double take.
“Hi,” Kendall said, and giggled as the couple hurried on toward the library.
“They’re gonna tell on us.”
“We’re too old to care.”
They went up Garland’s driveway to the steps of the wraparound porch.
“What did we do?” Kendall asked.
“Nothing smart.”
“I love you and feel like I should apologize to you for that.”
“Apology accepted.”
“It was kind of you to come.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“We both will, won’t we?”
“We will.”
They hugged and Julian watched her climb the steps. At the door, she smiled at him, a smile both heartrending and strangely hopeful, then she entered the house and the door closed.
It was dark and cold when Julian retrieved his Chrysler from the lot at Newark Airport. His visit with Kendall had kept him company on the flight, yet by the time he reached South Orange Village, Julian couldn’t face being alone in his apartment and continued past his building and along Meadowland Park. In the moonlight, a skater was spinning in circles on the duck pond, and Julian turned and drove up and down the streets, enjoying the glimmer of the gas lamps on the snow and the lights glowing in the houses. He remembered his father confessing that he hadn’t been designed for marriage. Perhaps this also applied to Kendall, but Julian rejected this view of himself, even though he was nearing forty and the only woman he’d ever wanted to marry didn’t want to marry anyone. He pulled up to a stop sign. Through a living room window to his left was a cabinet television, and on-screen Lucille Ball was slow dancing with Desi Arnaz. A man in a shirt and tie was behind the window with a little boy in his arms. The boy was wearing Dr. Denton pajamas. The man tossed him up and caught him. They were both laughing. When they disappeared from the window, Julian promised himself that he would never be lonely again.
Chapter 55
Julian met Clare Coddington while she was perched on a striped banquette at El Morocco, a green-eyed brunette with an aristocratic face, long, lovely legs, and an insouciant manner that had been refined over the centuries since her ancestors had sailed to the New World on the Mayflower. Clare, who resided with her parents in Westport, Connecticut, was in New York with two girlfriends for a night on the town. Julian bought the ladies a round of whiskey sours before inviting them to the Colony for dinner and a peek at high society, and after the soft-shell crabs, chicken hash, and pie à la mode, he took them over to Toots’s saloon for a nightcap. Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra were drinking each other under a table in back, and they greeted Julian as if he had just come home from the war.
“Interesting friends you have there,” Clare commented, with
more irony than amusement.
Even in the stodgy circles of Westport, the connection between erstwhile bootleggers and entertainers was well-known, and frankly, Clare preferred the Colony with its flannel-and-taffeta covey of Biddles, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys, but she was smitten with Julian: his immaculate manners and tailoring, his blue eyes and free way with a buck. The Coddington clan, after producing generations of shipping magnates and investment bankers, had started churning out archeologists and museum docents at an alarming rate, presenting Clare with the challenge of satisfying her impeccable taste in clothing, vacations, and real estate with an anemic financial legacy.
They had been dating for months before Julian introduced her to Fiona and Eddie at Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn. The steaks were rare, the wine robust, and the most interesting interchange went as follows:
Clare said to Fiona, “Julian tells me you go to Mass every day.”
“I like the exercise.”
“At Mass?”
“I walk to church.”
The next afternoon, when Julian went to the O’Rourkes to watch a Yankees–Indians game, Eddie commented, “Cute girl.”
Fiona brought a tray of frankfurters, potato chips, and beer into the den, and Julian asked her, “Do you have an opinion?”
Eddie started laughing. “Does the pope got a rosary?”
Fiona, more noted for her unvarnished judgments than her sensitivity, outdid herself by replying, “I liked Kendall better.”
So did Julian, who still pined for her in a private chamber of his heart. “But what do you think of Clare?”
“I think when a man decides to get married, the first woman who wants him, gets him.”