By these things, she certainly did not mean love. In the house of love and laughter, everyone saw the young black man and young white woman bent over the books, the newspapers, the record player, time after time, and no one thought of love.
Then, and in the same horrible month when suddenly the little twins, Thaddeus and Gayle, and Earley’s young wife, Grace Louise, all died of diphtheria within days of each other, whatever relationship there was between Victoria Anna and Jubal Rogers also died. Earley, stricken with his own griefs, put Jubal on a train to New Orleans, where he intended to join him, where they would find jobs together in a band. As for God, Earley renounced Him for murdering his wife and baby brothers. He planned to start over.
But Earley never went to New Orleans. He did instead what he thought he ought to do.
When Victoria came one night into her brother’s bedroom to tell him she wanted to go with him to New Orleans because she was carrying Jubal’s child, Earley, twenty years old, the family’s eldest son, the bishop’s choice, made a number of decisions. He felt he had to. His parents, devastated by the loss of their youngest children, were not at all aware of what was happening to their oldest daughter. Earley thought he knew not only the world better, he thought he knew his sister better than she knew herself. He’d seen Jubal with girls, he’d heard him talk about the kind of jazzed nighttime life he wanted to live, the life he’d already started on Bourbon Street. He didn’t believe Jubal knew what he was saying when he sent the letter to Earley with five hundred dollars to bring Victoria to New Orleans, when he enclosed the letter to Victoria that Earley never gave her. The young widower was in, as he’d told the bishop, a crisis of faith. He didn’t believe Victoria and Jubal could do anything but destroy themselves over what he knew, if they didn’t, could not possibly be love; not what he had shared with Grace Louise.
And so he did the right thing. Earley took his sister Victoria not to New Orleans but to Richmond. He told everybody that she was going there to start those college courses she’d always wanted to take. He told nobody that she was pregnant. He told Victoria that Jubal’s life didn’t and couldn’t ever include her, and finally he convinced her that the only sensible thing to do, given their ages, given their races, given their hometown, given the world, was to let the baby be put up for adoption as soon as it was born.
And that was what Victoria thought her brother had done. She was not allowed by the clinic’s policy to look at her son. As soon as they released her, she went to a Richmond employment agency, accepted a job with World Missions Supplies, and left from Newport News three weeks later for Hong Kong. She never heard from Jubal Rogers and he never heard from her. She didn’t come back to America until twelve years later, the night before her godson Raleigh’s confirmation.
The name Earley wrote on the birth certificate, when he realized that he couldn’t give the baby away forever to strangers, was Joshua Rogers. But the woman to whom he brought the infant, Carra Rogers in Thermopylae’s Darktown, always called the boy Josh. And when Jubal came through town with his new wife, Leda Carpenter, and took the boy away with him, north to New York City, Joshua would not let this stranger-father change his name.
The Return
Chapter 28
Of a Discovery Made by Raleigh
ATLANTA WAS THE “TERMINUS” of the Old South; her original name pragmatically bestowed by men looking only for a place to load their freight and change their trains. A terminus was all they needed. But, of the New South, she was the young Atalanta, racer after golden apples. She was Atlantis, newfound city of gold, as she burst up from the sea of Sherman’s whirlwind, reborn on geysers of millions upon millions of gallons of Coca-Cola. And now all underpasses and overpasses, all beltways and throughways, all cloverleafs, all trains, planes, buses, trucks, all roads led to Atlanta. On them half-a-million new people a year homed like wasps in their Audis and Peugeots to her hive of money. She was a new home. Home of the new Braves, new Hawks, new Falcons, new industry, new symphony, new art, and new cuisine. The new California calling the high-tech, high-rise, hi-fi, high-energy, lo-cal, lo mein, and tortellini primavera lifestyle people. She was the new Liberty, lifting the light of her revolving skyscraper tops to all those Northeasterners tired of being mugged, poor from being taxed, wretched from being cold huddled masses on dirty snowy streets. She was a place to start over, and at her center soared a high bronze statue of a bare-breasted woman raising aloft a phoenix. She was a place to think big. Bulldozers scooping red clay day and night couldn’t keep up with her appetite for malls and condominiums and subdivisions and more, more roads. She manufactured a million products, the best known of which were Scarlett O’Hara and Coca-Cola, the Real Thing, the Pause That Refreshes. But Atlanta herself never paused; she picked up the golden apples on the run, and faster coke came not in bottles but in packets.
“It’s Sunday and this town is hopping!” said Gates Hayes. “Wake up, Raleigh, let’s hit it!” But our hero rolled over in his new sheets on his new bed on the forty-seventh floor of the new seventy-story-high cylinder of glass and blue steel called the Peachtree Plaza Hotel; he slept on, girded above the clouds, for eight hours, even if the wrong eight. When he did awaken, his new pinstriped suit was gone and his new sports jacket hung in the dazzlingly bright bathroom, soaking wet and smelling like the wreck of Caroline’s perfume collection. Raleigh had to wear the white suit Mingo had given him. At least the new zipped pouch with his cash had been left behind; at least if Gates had stolen fifty dollars from it, he’d left a note on hotel stationery:
Stole $50. I.O.U. XXX, G Raleigh spotted his pinstripe as he was plummeting in the glass bubble of one of the outside elevators down to the free-form landing that was suspended over the enormous lobby’s enormous freeform reflection pool known as “Half-Acre Lake.” His suit was draped on a beautiful modern armchair beside the pool. In the suit was Gates Hayes. Across from Gates, an elderly woman in black leaned forward from the fur stole draped over her chair; her face was bent down to one of Gates’s hands, which she held in both of hers. Was she going to bite him? No. She was taking his other hand and turning it backward and forward. Was this Mrs. Parisi? She certainly didn’t look like the character from The Asphalt Jungle whom Hayes had imagined. She looked more like Rose Kennedy than a friend of any Rose who might be colloquial with Weeper Berg. Was she instead the newest Daughter of the Confederacy soon to fall prey to a fabricated genealogy and a forged letter of condolence from Robert E. Lee? Carefully descending a curving space-age ramp, Raleigh moved in for a closer look. At two of the tables nearby, business-suited black men studied folders from their open briefcases.
“Sir? Hi, I’m Timothy. Would you like to be seated in the peninsular lounge area?”
A young man in a short red jacket with a tray of drinks balanced on his fingers circled in front of Raleigh to ask this question.
But Hayes shook his head. If his brother were in the midst of his penitential apology to the grandmother of Cupid Parisi Calhoun, Raleigh wouldn’t intrude. From here at any rate, the woman did not look ready to pull a machine gun out of the potted gingko tree behind her. Besides, the man apparently known as Big Nose Solinsky was nowhere in sight—and would be hard to hide in this wide-open atrium of reflected lights and water. Leaving Gates to his own experienced devices, the elder Hayes went to the desk where he learned that a telephone message had just arrived from Mingo Sheffield: he was at the Omni looking for Pete and they should not expect him until eight or nine.
“Thank you,” said Hayes. “Excuse me, miss? What’s the Omni?”
The sleek and chic young black woman (“Carole,” according to her jacket), one of the many “hotel personnel” on duty at one of the many lobby desks, looked at the Thermopylean very much as a Parisian might look at an American who asked, not even, “Ou se trouve le Louvre?” but “What is the Louvre?” Then she caught herself, smiled helpfully, and said that the Omni was just about anything you could ask for. It was shops, restaurants, discos, a hotel,
and the coliseum home of the Atlanta Hawks.
“Thank you,” said Hayes, no further enlightened about his neighbor’s message; for he had paid little attention to Diane Yonge’s comment, in the middle of her labor, that her boyfriend Pete (“husband” was a legality only in Mingo’s mind) sold ice cream at the Omni. Our hero then went into one of the dining areas where “Byron” said he’d like to tell Raleigh some of their specials today and proceeded to describe most of the ingredients of five complex dishes. Hayes chose a delicate pastry stuffed with crab and sole in a lightly flavored white sauce called “Gustav’s Favorite.” Afterward, he chose American coffee over cappuccino, espresso, Viennese, mocha, Irish, and Gustav’s Special Blend. Afterward, he decided to call his wife while the rates were low, and before the Mafia rubbed him out.
Amazingly, even on a Sunday afternoon, the future mayor was home, although (according to Caroline) bombed to the max with Mrs. Sheffield.
“I beg your pardon,” the father sternly said to his daughter.
“Oh, you know, Daddy, like gassed. Listen, I love my perfume. It’s the absolute platinum. Kevin just goes, you know, freaksville. Thank you thank you, hug hug, kiss kiss. Daddy, guess what! Grandpa left Holly and I a zillion dollars!”
“Holly and me. And,” Hayes sighed, “it wasn’t a ‘zillion’ dollars, Caroline, and Grandpa is still alive, I assume, and therefore didn’t leave it to you. He…gave it to you.”
“Oh, you always twist my words around.” He heard a loud pop. Doubtless the receiver was covered in pink gum again. “Daddy, rilly, are you ever ever ever coming home? I have to talk to you, I mean seriously. I need to.”
“Honey, I’ll be home as soon as I can find Grandpa. Is there a problem?”
“I don’t want to talk about it now.”
Was Caroline getting married, dropping out of school, buying her own apartment? “I want to talk to you too.” He spoke earnestly. “You and Holly and I have to sit down and discuss the best thing to do with that money. It’s a real responsibility. When the time comes when you two decide to get married—”
“For shurr! Daddy, you know Holly’s never going to get married, and I’m going to marry for money first and then for love the next time.”
Both were appalling projections, but Hayes let them go. “Well, you need to save that money for the future, for college.”
“Oh, gross.”
“Well, we’ll discuss it later.” He rubbed his eyes. The discussion wasn’t going to be easy.
“Couldn’t I puhlease just at least buy a secondhand car? Nobody, I mean nobody, has to ride the schoolbus but us. With kids! It is so dorfus!”
“As you know, I had to walk to school, and no one considered it an injustice.”
“Daddy, the world has changed. You can’t keep going back to the Old Days. You just don’t trust me, you never did, and I might as well be dead.”
“That’s not true. Caroline, listen to me, I’m going to give you and your sister the station wagon.” Good Lord, what had he said?! Was he crazy?
“OHMIGOD! You are? You ARE? Oh Daddy, I love you I love you I love you kiss kiss.” A loud clank hurt Raleigh’s ears, then he heard a shriek, “HOLLY! HOLLY! MOM, YO, PHONE! HOLLY!” Caroline had obviously simply thrown the phone away and raced off with the news.
Well, all right, but he’d certainly have to set some ground rules about the car: no weeknights, no out of town…
“Hello, hot stuff.” It was his wife; as ever, determined to talk like a cable television film.
“Hello, Aura. I just gave the twins our station wagon.”
“Hey hey! So that’s why they’re jumping up and down on the couch.”
“Tell them to get off that couch!”
Peculiar laughter.
“What’s the matter with you, Aura?”
“Raleigh, honey, I am, as Caroline informs me, bombed to the max.” Giggles.
“Are you serious?”
“Nope, I’m loaded. Why should you be the only one? Vera and Barbara and I have polished off our last year’s anniversary champagne, Mongo’s bottle of Cold Duck, and let’s see, now we’re on a Lancer’s Rosé.”
“It’s Sunday afternoon!”
“More precisely, it’s Palm Sunday afternoon, and when Nemours took up the collection at church this morning, he skipped right past our row as if we weren’t sitting there, so we all went to lunch with the money!” Hilarious laughter from his wife, and in the background, the cackle of her drinking buddies. “We are celebrating, Raleigh. There is a serious celebration going on here.”
Hayes closed the glass door of his telephone booth. Outside it, eight young women in brand-new designer blue jeans were excitedly talking in German either about selling their brothers to a pencil factory or meeting their mothers there.
“I’m sorry, Aura, what did you say? What are you celebrating?”
Their celebration, she explained, was to congratulate Barbara Kettell on her formal separation from the world’s worst repressive patriarchal pig (presumably Nemours), and also to congratulate Vera Sheffield on suddenly becoming an honorary grandmother. It was the first Raleigh had heard of it, but apparently, unable to restrain himself, Mingo had called his wife at six in the morning to describe the delivery of Diane Yonge’s baby girl, and to announce that Diane (with no names of her own in mind—not surprisingly, since she had persisted in denying she was having the baby at all until thirty seconds before it arrived), that Diane had asked Mingo himself to suggest a name, and he, of course, had suggested “Vera.”
“Isn’t that the most wonderful thing? Vera’s been crying all day!”
“Where is Mingo? Yes, that’s wonderful.”
“Why are you asking me? Aren’t y’all in Atlanta?”
“He’s at the Omni.”
She laughed. “Honey, you’re strange.”
“I mean, what’s he up to? He should be back here now. Did he tell Vera?”
Finally Vera came to the phone herself to say that Mingo was looking for Diane’s husband. “Isn’t he the sweetest man that ever lived? And, Raleigh, the Lord will bless you forever for all you’ve done for him.”
Hayes rubbed his hair hard. “What?” Had Mingo told her that he’d found him a job? “Vera, I assure you…What do you think I’ve done for him?”
“Here’s your sweetie pie,” was the only answer he got. The phone clanged to the floor again.
“And what are you celebrating, Aura? Decided to run for President? Ha ha.”
“I am celebrating, oh, I don’t know…Life,” she airily replied. “Oh, Raleigh, I forgot, I have some sort of bad news.”
“Wait.” Hayes sat down on the bronzed stool. “All right. What is it?” Surely she wouldn’t say “sort of” bad news if the house had burned down, if his father had just telephoned from Bangkok, if…
“I was at my office yesterday evening.”
Her office? Oh, Mothers for Peace.
“And I went up to yours, to see how things were going…”
“Oh God, what is it?”
“Betty Hemans and Bill Jenkins went down to the basement and threw her whole manuscript in the incinerator.”
Raleigh took his knuckle out of his mouth. “Is that all?”
“All?! Honey, she was just in pieces. She hates you and your whole family.”
“Me? How is it my fault if her stupid novel’s no good?”
“What? No, it’s not that.…Oh, I like that one, Vera, especially the straps.”
“Aura…”
“Sorry. Just a sec. We’re all trying on Vera’s samples, you know, her lingerie. You should see us.”
“No doubt.”
“She’s taking your advice about ‘Vera’s of Thermopylae.’ By the way, Raleigh, Holly said you stole that idea from her.”
“I did.” Out in the airport of a lobby he could see Gates and Mrs. Parisi(?), standing to look at the spouting water fountains gushing out of the pool. Now Gates was holding her hand. “Aura, I’ve got to go. Tell
me. Is Betty quitting? She’s not leaving Bonnie Ellen alone in my office again, is she?”
“No, don’t worry. She says she honors her commitments even if some people named Hayes don’t.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I’ve explained to her about those retirement benefits a thousand times!”
“Raleigh, you’re not listening. Betty gave her novel to Sue Ann Swain to read, and then Friday Mrs. Swain came over in an absolute tizzie because she thought Betty had stolen all her old love poems and letters from your uncle Whittier and stuck them in her novel. Then it turns out Betty had stuck her own love poems from your uncle Whittier in her novel. Then late yesterday they both pull out all their old letters, and they’re all exactly the same. Including marriage proposals! Word for word! ‘Remember Me!’ I’ll say. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but, honey, your godfather sure didn’t mind taking risks. What if he had come home?”
Handling Sin Page 52