“I would,” Eve said, and recognizing that a deal was being ironed out, she arranged her face so that it projected earnest conviction.
“Daddy and I will discuss it,” her mother said, before adding her final condition. “But before we do I want you to apologize to Grandmommy for your appalling behavior toward her when she came to see you in Roanoke.”
• • •
The following morning, Good Friday, Eve was greeted in the kitchen by her mother, holding a wicker basket filled with warm blueberry muffins, wrapped in a blue-and-white-checked napkin.
“Run these to Mother while they are still warm,” instructed Mrs. Whalen.
“Can’t I have a cup of coffee first?” asked Eve.
Ada, who was rinsing off dishes in the sink, dried her hands with a towel, preparing to fix Eve a cup.
“There’s coffee at The Cottage,” Eve’s mother said.
• • •
The Cottage was covered in weathered gray shingles, the door painted robin’s-egg blue. The Town Car was parked in the driveway, and not in the garage, which meant she must have an appointment that day, perhaps at the beauty parlor to get her hair fixed for Easter, or maybe someone was hosting Bridge Club. As Eve walked by the Lincoln she saw Willie sitting inside, wearing his tweed driver’s cap. He tipped his hat and smiled when she waved.
Eve knocked on the front door, but no one came to greet her. She leaned back on her heels, waiting her grandmother out. She was certain Grandmommy had watched her approach from the living room, as she had seen the curtain jerk. Oh, well. Let her play her games. Eve knocked once more, and after a few more moments Grandmommy answered, wearing a navy-blue dress printed with pink flowers and sturdy blue heels, pearls around her neck and in each earlobe.
Grandmommy did not acknowledge Eve exactly, just stood erect in the doorframe, blinking, as if Eve were delivering a parcel and Grandmommy was simply waiting for her to hand it over.
“I’m sorry I was so rude when you came to Belmont. I was feeling protective of Daniella, but I know that’s no excuse.”
Grandmommy’s facial expression did not change. She stood, impassive, for what seemed like a very long time before allowing Eve the slightest smile.
“Well,” she said. “I appreciate how fond you are of your friend, but you shouldn’t have disrespected your grandmother.”
“No, ma’am, I shouldn’t have.” Eve affected a look of contrition and then held up the wicker basket filled with blueberry muffins. “Muffin?”
Grandmommy glanced at the slender gold watch around her wrist. “I suppose there’s time for one before my appointment,” she said. “Though really I shouldn’t. I’m trying to reduce.”
“Why?” asked Eve, walking into the house even though she hadn’t yet been invited inside. “Who cares?”
“I shouldn’t care about my appearance simply because I’m of a certain age?” Grandmommy asked, but Eve could hear bemusement behind the admonition.
“I don’t mean that of course,” said Eve. “I mean you’re already tiny as a bird. You should enjoy yourself. Have a muffin. Have a muffin with butter!”
“Oh, all right, you naughty thing,” said Grandmommy. The truth was, prior to Eve dropping out of Fleur she and her grandmother had always gotten along well, had been close. Indeed, Eve was named after her—Evelyn Elliot.
They sat at the little bridge table in the living room, eating their muffins on Grandmommy’s casual china, spreading their butter with a sterling Strasbourg knife, the same pattern as the tea set that Grandmommy had given her to take to Belmont, an item she most certainly would not be displaying at Barnard, though she wouldn’t be sharing that with her grandmother.
“You’re still a Fleur, by the way,” said Grandmommy, giving Eve a conspiratorial little grin.
“No, I’m not,” Eve said. “I officially dropped out. Signed the papers and everything in front of Fleur’s president, Bunny.”
“Bunny Malone never filed your resignation,” Grandmommy said.
“What?”
“Dear, if Bunny was instructed to tear up your resignation papers, you had better believe she did. Regardless of whether or not you choose to associate with Fleur while you’re at Belmont, officially you are still a member in good standing. I know that doesn’t mean much to you right now, but one day you will be happy to have the sisterhood in your corner. If nothing else, you might have a daughter who wants to join.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes, Grandmommy, you are incorrigible.”
“Friendships come and go, my dear, but Fleur is forever.”
• • •
That summer Eve returned to Atlanta to make her debut. All debs were required to volunteer a certain number of hours a week, which Eve did at Piedmont Hospital, donning a pink-and-white “candy striper” pinafore and checking in on patients to see if they needed water or perhaps wanted to play a hand of cards. She was so friendly and engaging that some of the patients began asking for her by name. Sometimes she would catch a ride to the hospital with her father, whose obstetrics practice was in the adjacent medical building. Other times she would drive her brother Charlie’s MG convertible, as Charlie was in Europe that summer, touring the sites before he began law school at Emory in the fall. She spent the rest of her time swimming at the Driving Club. After completing her laps she would bob by the side of the pool, holding on to the edge with one hand, sunglasses on over her bathing cap, studying the Negro employees. They were all so deferential, all “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir,” as if there was nothing they would rather do than swap out fresh towels for used ones and bring glasses of iced tea to white people. Surely they were burning up in their starched uniforms, despite the explanation her father once gave when, as a girl, she commented from the back of his Coupe de Ville about how hot the maids must be walking to the bus station in the summer sun. “Colored people don’t get as hot because they are originally from Africa,” her father had explained. “They are biologically engineered to be comfortable in the heat.”
Back then she had believed everything he said. Now she was uncertain of almost all he had taught her. Surely the uniformed workers at the Driving Club resented the white ladies prancing around in their daring two-pieces, diving in the water whenever they needed to cool off.
Did they resent her? Did they hate her?
She tried to shake away those worries. Daniella had, as gently as possible, cautioned her that racial inequality wasn’t an easy thing to put right. That had been the problem with the letter she had sent to Headmaster Dupree about Miss Eugenia. She could see that now. Sure, her moral indignation was justified, but it cost Miss Eugenia her job. Fresh shame washed over her every time she pictured the look of despair on Miss Eugenia’s face as she carried her well-worn suitcase out of her emptied room. She thought she would never get over the shame. But Daniella had reminded her that the issue of racism was much bigger than Eve and her guilt. The issue was that they lived in a country where Negroes were treated as second-class citizens. Bringing about equality was what mattered, not Eve’s sad feelings about the situation.
Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if Ada had ever actually loved her.
• • •
Over the course of the summer Eve tried to be as accommodating as possible of her parents and grandmother, for fear that her mother might change her mind at the last minute and refuse to let Eve board the plane that would take her to Manhattan. And when Daniella called long-distance, in tears, to tell her that she wasn’t going to be able to come down to Atlanta to attend Eve’s deb party, the low-country BBQ that Eve’s parents were hosting along with the parents of five of her girlfriends from Coventry, Eve was quietly relieved, knowing she could fake it better without her enlightened friend around. Daniella was a senior counselor at the summer camp she had attended in the Berkshires ever since she was twelve, and Eve’s party coincided with their all-important Peace Olympics. Daniella swore she would come another weekend, and she did, but it was an uneventful o
ne with no deb events scheduled, and so the two friends spent most of their time driving Charlie’s convertible to The Varsity for onion rings, which Daniella proclaimed the best she had ever had.
Eve did as she had promised: fulfilled her duty as a member of the Atlanta Debutante Club, acting with honor, grace, and good cheer. And honestly, some of the parties were really fun, including her own, at which the guests ate pulled pork doused in vinegar sauce, along with boiled shrimp, corn, potatoes, and sausage, before dancing to Carolina beach music. And she had to admit the dresses her mother bought for her were beautiful. Still, her thoughts lay mostly with what was ahead—college in New York City. She hadn’t even seen Barnard in person, but she’d memorized every detail of the photos in the brochure that the college sent. And of course she adored New York from what she had seen of it on-screen, especially in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and BUtterfield 8. Since Daniella had almost gone to Barnard instead of Belmont in the first place, she was able to tell Eve all about it. Those final few weeks of their freshman year, their acceptances to Barnard pinned to the corkboard in their room (the corkboard Eve had once imagined showcasing all of their pictures and paraphernalia from Fleur), she basked in the tutorials Daniella offered about the world they would soon be entering.
“Barnard’s campus is attractive, stately,” Daniella lectured as they walked the short distance from Monty House to the dining hall, the setting sun ablaze with pink and orange. “Not nearly so gorgeous as this, but having New York City at our fingertips will make up for it!”
Daniella also told Eve that there would be a lot of Jewish girls at Barnard, her words sounding almost like a warning.
“Good,” Eve had shot back. “My best friend’s Jewish.”
“I’m beginning to think that’s the thing you like most about me,” Daniella said, linking an arm through Eve’s as they strolled through the bucolic campus they would soon leave behind.
• • •
It wasn’t so much Jewish girls that Eve noticed when she arrived at Barnard as northern girls, northern girls who operated from a different code of conduct than she had been taught. That first month of school she was always getting her feelings hurt, which was funny considering that the summer before she had felt as if she were constantly bruising the feelings of her fellow debutantes. Try as she had—and she had been truly trying, since her future at Barnard depended on it—she had never displayed the proper level of enthusiasm over a girl’s gown, or the darling little favors passed out at this party or that, or the particular shade of coral nail polish that would match both the lipstick and the skirt. But in New York things were reversed, and she was forever feeling like a rube. Like the time she casually mentioned that in high school she had been a fan of Pat Boone, and suddenly everyone in the common room where they were gathered was groaning in disgust, with Abby, who wore her dark hair long and straight and was somehow on the Pill even though she was not engaged, proclaiming, “I would honestly rather die than listen to that shit.”
But Abby, who was biting and sarcastic and always seemed ready to insult Eve, wasn’t really representative of Barnard girls. Abby was actively mean while the others were just . . . brash. Bold. Opinionated. Utterly confident in their opinions about everything, from the type of sandwich to order at Chock full o’ Nuts (the nutty sandwich, of course), to the utter brilliance of Marjorie Morningstar, to whether or not Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in Vietnam was admirable or simply insane (the girls were split on that one). Eve admired their bedrock confidence, but she didn’t know how to make inroads with them, these girls who had already gone through freshman year together. She had Daniella, thank God, but Daniella had started dating a handsome sophomore from Columbia, Pete Strum, who was forever whisking her away from Barnard altogether, taking her down to the Village for romantic dinners at some little Italian hole-in-the-wall they called “our place.”
Things got better when she took the job at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue, not because she needed the money—her father sent her a generous allowance—but because she needed something to claim as her own. The Hungarian Pastry Shop was catty-corner from the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which Eve loved for its sheer size and majesty. Some of her co-workers were actually from Europe, if not Hungary. Ozge from Istanbul taught Eve to boil her coffee with cardamom before pouring it into a tiny teacup, a single sugar cube placed at the bottom. Chloe from Paris got her hooked on Gauloises. Eve had smoked occasionally at Belmont, at parties and such, but at Barnard she smoked all of the time. It seemed everyone in New York did. The Hungarian Pastry Shop would fill with smoke as students from Barnard, Columbia, Teachers College, and Union Theological Seminary wrote papers or polemics or poems or put their heads together to talk heatedly about whatever news, often of racial oppression in the South, caught their attention.
One night around dusk when she was on a smoke break outside, a rugged, handsome man, not much taller than she, stopped and asked if she had a light. She handed him a box of matches from the front pocket of her skirt. She had swiped the matchbox from Daniella, who had brought it home from “her” Italian place downtown, Mother Bertolotti’s.
The man managed to light the match on his first try, something she could never do, especially with that particular box, as the strip was too slick. He exhaled a series of smoke rings before motioning across the street to the cathedral, asking, “Don’t you think they ought to do something useful with that place?” He had the faintest trace of a southern accent. He sounded like her uncle who lived in Charlottesville.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Someone ought to knock it down and turn it into a park, or affordable housing, or a community center—something that actually serves the people of Harlem.”
“St. John the Divine?”
“Yep.”
“Knock it down? Are you crazy?” she asked, thinking he must be joking, but what a queer thing to joke about. “The whole place is a work of art. And it’s a church. I’m not sure what’s more useful than that.”
“Yeah, it’s awfully useful to sit around eating wafers and lighting incense. Think about it: The church is responsible for either instigating or overlooking pretty much every evil perpetuated. You know the German Lutheran Church was in lockstep with the Nazis.”
“Not Bonhoeffer’s church,” said Eve, pleased with her knowledge of the German pastor and dissident who was eventually arrested for trying to assassinate Hitler. A professor from Union had given a talk on Bonhoeffer that she and Daniella had attended.
“Sure, but Bonhoeffer was executed by the state. So basically, what he shows is that the church can either be complicit and go along with the bastards in charge, or it can martyr itself and its followers. How about saying, ‘Screw you!’ to Big Brother and also having a little fun?”
“I’m not following,” Eve said. “How does saying, ‘Screw you!’ to Big Brother help with affordable housing?”
“Not just pretty but smart,” he said.
He was not dressed like a Virginian, or, at least, any Virginian she knew. He was dressed like a beatnik, wearing a black turtleneck over jeans, his dark curls long enough so that he could push them behind his ears.
Her co-worker Donovan, who wore funny-looking leather sandals over black socks, stuck his head out of the shop’s door: “Break time’s over, Eve.”
Eve took one last drag of her cigarette before crushing it beneath her foot.
“Eve, huh?” said the man.
“Yep.”
“I’m Warren.”
“Hi, Warren.”
“So if I come inside and order a hot cocoa from you, will you give me extra marshmallows on top?”
“We don’t sell hot cocoa. Maybe try Schrafft’s.”
Schrafft’s was a lunch place that catered to ladies who took off their white gloves before nibbling at chicken salad followed by butterscotch sundaes. He acknowledged her insult with a smile, showing off the straightest teeth she had ever seen.
“You like to ball?”
“Come again?” asked Eve, thinking he was referring to a new cocktail or perhaps had somehow intuited that she was a debutante and was teasing her about the parties.
“Well, yeah, with me you probably would.”
Eve looked at him blankly.
“Ball, screw, get laid, you know?”
“You better be glad I don’t call the police,” she said, and turned to march inside with all of the self-righteousness the moment called for.
“Just messing with you, kid!” he called after her. In that moment he sounded like her brother, Charlie.
• • •
Later, after her shift ended, she sat side by side with Daniella on her twin bed in their dorm room and told her about her exchange with Warren.
“I’ve seen him!” Daniella exclaimed. “He’s a junior at Columbia. Short, kind of muscular, really good-looking?”
“Disconcertingly so,” said Eve, going on to describe his sleepy brown eyes, his white teeth, his dark curls worn a little too long to be respectable.
“Yep. That’s Warren St. Clair. From some old Richmond family, I’ve heard. Supposedly he was a protégé of C. Wright Mills. I think he rode motorcycles with him. He’s really brilliant but pretty wild. When you sleep with him it’s called getting ‘St. Claired.’ ”
“I’m not going to sleep with him!”
“I don’t mean you, goose; I mean girls in general. He has a reputation. Abby told me all about him. She met him at some CORE thing.”
“What’s CORE?” asked Eve, thinking that surely Abby had been St. Claired.
“Committee of Racial Equity? Or maybe Congress of Racial Equality?”
“Daniella! Why aren’t we in that?”
“Don’t you think we should get a little settled before we jump into anything, learn the lay of the land?”
“But that’s just it!” cried Eve. “That’s the problem. We get too settled, and then we stop seeing how unfair everything is. Did I tell you that I found out about Medgar Evers’s death through Ada? I walked into the kitchen one morning last June and I could tell she had been crying. I kept asking her what was wrong, and she finally showed me the headline of the colored newspaper she takes, along with a picture of Evers’s wife and three children. And then my parents came down for breakfast and all they could talk about—well, all my mom could talk about—was how tacky the decorations had been at Mary Louise Bennet’s party the night before. The whole thing just made me sick.”
We Are All Good People Here Page 5