by Dorothy West
My children were never conceived. It was my choice even more than it was yours. I did not want to bear a child who would have no legitimate claim to your name. Your love was total compensation.
When i turned thirty, you joked about my coming of age, and we both laughed. You said that i had grown prettier and only looked an inch or so older. It was my love for you that made my face glow.
A man in his forties and into his fifties is considered to be at his peak in any performance, business or bed, but a woman’s ego is not treated likewise. That i was twenty when we met seems almost impossible. I was just out of my tiresome teens, out of nursing school, too, the top student in my class, ready to test my skills in the magiccity of new york, so distant and different from my small hometown. It was a long-time dream come true. That i would ever be forty was light-years away from my thinking.
Then i met you, and how we met was as awesome as a miracle, i had never known or ever seen up close a colored man so self-assured and sophisticated, i fell in love with you instantly, but i tried not to let it show. My common sense told me that a successful and handsome man with your charm would hardly be a bachelor. And so i confined my wishing to hoping that one day through you i might meet some ambitious young doctor who could use the encouragement of a wife who knew his field and would help him climb until he reached your height.
But the day that i fell at your door, i fell at your feet. And i knew that i was still a green girl helplessly falling in love at first sight, not yet a seasoned woman who could control her heart. Working with you and loving you and making love with you became my world. I was a grown woman who knew her own mind, or so i thought.
zYou’ve talked about asking your wife for a divorce when your daughters were married and their husbands had replaced you as their protectors. But too often the dream turns into a nightmare. I don’t want to know if you might change your mind about marrying me. I’ve chosen to change my mind instead.
Tomorrow, when you receive this letter, i will be the wife of jim logan. Just the two of us before a justice ofthe peace. I’m sure jim’s name is not on the guest list of your friends, or on yours, nor is mine. Shelby’s wedding will be totally unaffected.
Jim’s been a city employee all of his working years. When he retires, his pension, which is adequate, comes due. As for me, i am hopeful that some doctor or hospital will find my years of experience worth an interview, and that the outcome will be satisfactory.
Jim’s wife died two years ago. We met years before at bridge parties and became close friends. I rarely spoke of these gatherings to you because your disinterest in them was apparent and understandable. His daughters know me and are fond of me because of my affection for their mother. They are married themselves with young children. Their jobs and their families leave them little time to keep in daily touch with their father and his quiet way of life. When he asked me to marry him, i think it was with their coaxing, and maybe their coaching. If they knew about you, they knew i wore no wedding ring, and persuaded their father that the risk was worth the try.
I will sleep in my own bed, but he will not be unwelcome if or when he asks to come to me. He loved his wife. I can never take her place, nor can he take yours. He misses a wife’s companionship; i need a wife’s sense of security.
I do not regret the years we were together nor will i ever forget them. I have rewritten this letter three times and it always comes out the same way.
my best to you, clark. I hope you will wish the same to me.
Rachel
Clark’s hands trembled as he finished reading the letter. He suddenly noticed the quality of the air in the car—through the closed window on his left the sun’s lancing rays seemed to shimmer before him. The fight thinned out the oxygen somehow, and he could feel a pressing on his temples.
Clark shook his head sharply, suddenly recalling why he was sitting in the ferry parking lot. Greeting corinne’s tiresome relatives, exchanging small talk, driving them to the oval … it seemed at that moment absolutely inconceivable—he had to get out of there. No, he decided. He’d face corinne’s wrath. With that, he flipped the key in the ignition and began the drive back home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Clark’s car careened through the Oval. The two front windows were rolled all the way down, and the dirty wind rushing in clawed at his throat and scattered the papers that lay on his back seat—ledgers, receipts, a brown paper bag. He jerked the steering wheel to the left and guided the wagon—a source of pride, the first of its make on the Vineyard—up the gently sloping gravel path that ended in a semicircle in front of the kitchen door to the house. He took the path too fast and had to brake sharply, bracing his arms on the wheel as he did so. More unfamiliar cars were parked in the grass, more off-island visitors. Well, they could all go hang, he thought to himself. He turned off the car’s engine and slumped down in his seat.
Then a curious coolness came over him, and as he looked down at the letter lying in his lap, it seemed far away somehow, like a ship on the horizon, or a penny glinting at the bottom of a well. He took a deep breath and raised his head, and he did the only thing a Coles could do in his position: he pulled himself together. Here was a man born into the finest family Harlem had to offer, a man sent to the best New England preparatory school there was, a product of Harvard Medical School, a successful diagnostician, the owner of a brownstone on Seventh Avenue and 136th Street that was the envy of most, the owner of all he now surveyed, a sparkling blue house with glassed-in porches, set back on an immaculately tended lawn. Here was a man not accustomed to questioning his assumptions.
Clark had bought this property, the most coveted in the Oval, almost sight unseen. As successful as his practice was at that time, the house would still have been beyond his means, except that its previous owner, an old spinster, had died suddenly, leaving it to a faraway brother who was anxious to sell.
Clark would not learn until after the house was purchased that the spinster was Miss Amy Norton Norton. Her father had willed his house to her, well knowing that on his death the others would probably scatter to other resorts if their mates expressed a desire for a change; knowing, too, that his spinster daughter would always have room for them all, while they, because of marital pulls, might not have room for each other. That this was the house that only a generation later Clark Coles was to buy for his family was almost too perfect. Clark was sure that his father would have disapproved of their annual summer hegira. His father would have seen the whole enterprise as tempting fate, risking the wrath of an angry God who would not be amused by the indulgence implied by so much leisure time. Clark knew that Isaac was too much a product of his generation, the generation of colored people that had not yet learned to take vacations, let alone own a summer house. But Clark was the son who made real a dream his father never thought to have, the dream of owning a home on the island, and that by some happy coincidence it was the very home Isaac had summered in as a boy made it all the sweeter.
And yet it would have saddened Isaac to know that one story of his childhood that none of his family remembered was the role Miss Amy Norton Norton played in his life. She was the hand of God who had plucked him out of the Jim-Crow-riddled South and into a new life. So many whites had done so much to make the colored man’s life miserable that it was all too easy to forget the miraculous migration of white spinster schoolteachers, women—mostly Presbyterian or Unitarian—who flocked to the South, giving up everything they had to teach a generation of newly emancipated children, most of whom had less than nothing. It would have saddened Isaac to know that Miss Amy Norton Norton’s name would never be mentioned to his future grandchildren, one of whom was to be married in the ballroom in which Miss Amy had danced when she too was of marriageable age, though not of marriageable mind, having found no man whose name was worthy of substituting for hers.
As Clark thought about the ceremony that would take place in his house in less than twenty-four hours, a wave of bitterness washed up from wi
thin him. He had been too preoccupied with planning his upcoming life with Rachel to pay all that much mind to Shelby’s wedding and its implications, outside of the formalities that it had been incumbent on him as father to dispatch in the past weeks and months, most of which involved his checkbook. But now where Rachel had been nothing but a hole remained, a gaping wound in his side that would never scab over. In place of that hole there had been a lifeline just a few hours earlier, an invisible cord that had always fed him, sustained him, no matter how far away he traveled. Without it, he felt himself transparent, insignificant, a shade of his former self. All he had left were his daughters.
A cool northern breeze blew through the car. It was such a beautiful day, Clark thought to himself grimly. He felt detached from his observation, the way he imagined an engineer might feel surveying a grassy knoll that was to be dynamited to clear the way for a road or a set of railroad tracks. A stillness in the air seemed to hum at his ears, and for the first time in a very long time it did not much matter to him what he did next. Clark had always felt a sort of perverse pride in the way his life moved from demand to demand, the way he stoically shouldered the weight of his responsibilities with his chin thrust out nobly. Now, though, when he considered the switchpoints and crossroads he had bulled through he had to ask himself what his life boiled down to. What was his life, really, but a series of missed opportunities, a succession of situations in which he had waited too long to act?
First there had been Sabina, and everything since then was in a way a curse on him for never apologizing to her, never explaining. What explanation was necessary, though? In Sabina, he had never seen anyone more desirable as a woman; in Corinne, he had never seen anyone more desirable as a wife. She was everything his Brookline background demanded—she was fair, she would give him fair children, and her father was near the top of an honorable profession. No, his blood did not boil in Corinne’s presence, no, she did not set his skin ablaze the way Sabina did, but were such base urges the stuff of lasting relationships? Perhaps not, but now, Clark mused, he had thirty years of evidence that their absence was no guarantee of happiness either.
And now Rachel. Clark did not know where to go from here. He had held the revered position of Dr. Clark Coles for so long, he had rested for so long against the cool pillar of icy imperative and thought that at the end of the day that would somehow be enough to keep the demons at bay, he had stoically borne the burden of his parents’ expectations, but all at a terrible cost. Advanced social position did not come without an abnegation, an obliteration of the personal, the intimate, the hidden, the passionate. A balance had to be achieved, but that was a lesson learned at the expense of all too many of Clark’s generation, a generation half afraid that all the insidious white stereotypes contained a germ of truth, a generation mired in the self-hatred that was bigotry’s most monstrous crime, more damaging than a laundry list of physical indignities because it amounted to a mental rape, a theft of personal dignity.
Clark ground his teeth bitterly. Never to have a chance to defend himself … yes, fine, hard enough … but never to be able to say good-bye, never to win some sort of closure, however heartrending, that was the crudest twist. Memories, images of the sweet, intimate moments they shared, danced in front of his eyes. He thought of obscure gestures of small, silent tenderness, tiny moments that contained within them an eternity, moments he had never shared with anyone before, and would likely not share with anyone ever again.
Clark opened the car door and stepped out onto the lawn. Perhaps it was too late for him. Perhaps he had passed his own personal point of no return long ago without ever realizing it. What was the word his pretentious friends so favored at cocktail parties? Karma?
It may be too late for me, he thought. But it might not be too late for my daughter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shelby looked up from her desk and put her pen down when her father strode into the room and closed the door behind him. He had a look on his face that she had never seen before. “Dad, what’s wrong?”
Clark stopped short in front of her desk, his hands twitching at his sides. He turned abruptly and began pacing from side to side, his fingers restlessly drumming his pants legs until he noticed them and laced them together behind his back to subdue them. He stopped in his tracks and turned to Shelby, a storm in his eyes.
“Shelby, I don’t know how to say this, don’t know that I have a right to say it, don’t know that it will make a bit of difference.” He paused, flustered. “I don’t claim to have been a wonderful father to my daughters—”
“Oh, Dad …”
“Let me finish,” he said tersely. “—don’t claim to have set a particularly wonderful example for you in terms of the institution of marriage. I know it must seem to you that Corinne and I are not as close as perhaps one might think we should be. And I’m not naive, I know that children have eyes, and ears, and a brain to read what their senses tell them. And so I know you’re probably aware that your mother and I, we …” Clark was in agony. He despised human weakness, and he could neither believe that he was responsible for the words coming out of his mouth nor stop himself from saying them.
“Dad, I don’t know what’s gotten into you.” Shelby picked up a seashell paperweight and placed it on the letter she was writing. She pushed her chair away from the desk. “But I’m getting married tomorrow, and I love you, and I love my mother, and I know full well”—she grimaced, thinking of the morning’s argument with Liz—“that the fire died for the two of you some time ago. But why you would choose now to unburden yourself is, I admit, beyond me.”
Clark drew himself up, a pained expression set deep in his normally impassive face. Just a few hours ago the idea of having this talk with his daughter would have seemed absurd, but now he could do little to quell the pain inside him that howled to be set free. “Shelby, Meade is a fine man. He is talented, and handsome, and decent, and you’d have to be blind not to see that he’s devoted to you. I see how he looks at you, and if there had been anything but love in his eyes I would have throttled him long ago. But he loves you, I can’t deny it; he does love you.”
Clark walked over to Shelby’s bed, Shelby following him silently with her eyes as he hitched up his pants and sat down. A few grains of wet sand still clung to his legs from his morning walk, and he brushed them off absent-mindedly and watched them fall to the hardwood floor. Utterly uncomfortable, he looked like what he was: a father mightily unaccustomed to arguing with his daughter about affairs of the heart. Having in the past always assumed that Corinne would make their daughter understand all of the personal, feminine things she needed to, when she needed to, he found himself treading on dangerous ground. “Now when I was your age, if somebody had asked me what I thought love was, I would have told them. I knew what love was. Didn’t everybody know? Right now, I might not be able to tell you how I would’ve answered that question back then, but I do know that I was a lot more sure than I am now. The fact is, sometimes I think romantic love is just another scourge put on this earth by the Lord, another measuring rod that no one thinks they quite measure up to, a simple idea that never seems to fit the two messy lives it’s assigned to cover.”
“Not to stop this fine sermon when you’re on a roll, but what do your doubts about love have to do with me?” Shelby was growing more and more indignant. “You yourself admit you’re hardly an expert on the matter.”
“And you are, my sweet young daughter?” Clark raised his eyebrows. “You’ve never given the time of day to a single black man who’s taken an interest in you.” He stared at the wall.
Shelby drew her breath and scowled down at the edge of her desk. Her throat felt too choked with her indignation to respond to the accusation she heard on her father’s lips.
“But it so happens that the first white man who pays attention to you—”
“Stop it! Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Shelby clenched her fists and pounded them down on the shiny surface of the mahogany deskto
p with a resounding thud. “You take the prize.” Her neck snapped back and she stared at her father. “I expect this from Meade’s parents, but even they might pause a little before laying in the night before. How dare you?”
Clark’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t coming out right. I just have to know the truth, is all. God knows what love means, but if this marriage is about love, then I won’t say another word. But I’ve never seen you give your trust to a colored man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s because you saw in the one you know best a man who can’t be trusted. And I’ve never seen you give your love to a colored man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s because the man who should be the most important man in your life never found time to show you the love he felt. And I’ve never seen you give your respect to a colored man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s some warped extension of this family’s social snobbery. And if that’s all true”— Clark’s voice rose—“then I will do anything in my power to make sure this marriage does not happen.”
The last word died from Clark’s lips, and this final exhalation of breath seemed to take with it all the life he had left in him. His shoulders slumped like a defeated toy soldier’s and he slowly put his face in his hands.
Shelby stared at her father in mute amazement. She had never seen him so broken, and an amorphous stew of pity, revulsion, and hatred stirred within her. As she pondered his words, the hatred won out. “I guess this is a thought that just occurred to you? Or did you think the whole wedding was one big joke, and you had to wait until now to make sure we were really going through with it?”