My father looked up from the book he’d been reading, his gray eyes blinking as if he didn’t quite understand, “If you say so, Iris.”
“They’re stupid and ugly! If they have any brains at all, it’s because they have white blood!”
“And where did that come from?” I asked, trying to sound like my name, innocent. I knew it came from the ‘massa’ helping himself to black slaves’ bodies while his wife slept quietly, aware or unaware, in their well-appointed plantation’s master bedroom.
“I could wring your neck!” My mother’s porcelain skin had turned an ugly reddish color. I thought she might have a heart attack if she kept this up.
“Sit down, Mother. You’re out of your mind and it’s not good for you!”
I gave my father an imploring look. He’d continued reading his book, one I’d given him for Christmas, Light in August, by William Faulkner. He furrowed his smooth brow and said, “Did he really win a Nobel Prize for this book?” Then, he looked at my mother. “What? What’s going on?” He looked truly quizzical. He’d long ceased trying to understand the women in his family. He glanced at my little sister in her latest cashmere sweater and pleated skirt. He smiled.
At that moment, the telephone rang.
“Don’t answer that! It’s that nigger calling again!” My mother stood up and blocked the phone. I lunged past her and we had a brief struggle as I took it off the receiver.
“Let go!”
My mother hit me with the receiver. I shrieked and rubbed my shoulder where the receiver hit me.
“Iris, Iris…” I heard faintly.
A chagrined look came over my mother’s angered face. It was her mother. She forced a smile and spoke into the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Is that you, honey? I wanted to wish you a merry Christmas!” My grandmother’s sweet voice echoed from the other end of the line.
“Oh, Mother! We didn’t know it was you! Merry Christmas! And thank you for all the gifts! You really shouldn’t have…”
“Do the clothes fit the girls? I hope I got the right size.”
My grandmother, used to my grandfather’s penurious allowance, always shopped in bargain basements for our Christmas presents, and the clothes were always a size too big, but we didn’t care. They were from Grandma, and we adored her.
“Some of them are a bit large, but the place mats will look nice on our kitchen table,” said my mother. She’d just said the place mats were the wrong color as we ate our waffles. A honeyed tongue indeed.
“How are you and Craig? And the girls?”
“We’re just fine, Mother. How are things in Lake Worth? I know we should visit there someday…”
We watched my mother expectantly, waiting to be allowed to speak to Grandma and thank her for our Christmas presents. Phone calls were expensive, so we only got to talk to her once a year, namely on Christmas Day. My sister and I waited. My mother rambled on about my father’s job difficulties. He looked miserable.
“Could I speak to Inny?” asked Grandma.
I lunged at the phone. My mother gave it to me with a dirty look.
“Grandma!”
“Oh, little Inny, how good it is to hear your voice!”
“Thank you for the pretty lavender dress and the matching slip. I’ve tried them all on and they fit just right! You always pick the prettiest presents! We just love them!”
“Oh, Honey, I’m so happy you can wear them. I always worry that they’re the wrong size…” Her voice trailed off. She started to cry. Actually, she started to bawl.
“Don’t cry, Grandma! Please don’t cry! We’re all right here!”
Grandma dissolved into tears and could no longer speak.
“Please don’t cry, Grandma!” I begged her. I was too young to understand how much she missed us. Grandpa had sold their home in Arlington – Clarendon, to be exact – and moved them to Lake Worth, Florida, to be with his family. It had nearly killed her, I imagined, but she never let on.
A stern look on her face, my mother took the phone from me. My little sister begged to talk to Grandma, too. My father looked befuddled.
“Mother, stop blubbering. You always cry and we never get to talk!”
We could hear more sobs on the other end of the line with a muffled, “I’m… sorry…”
I felt my heart sink. I wished my grandmother could be with us at Christmas. I wished she could live with us. I missed her more than I realized. I began to think of my cousin, my Aunt Edna and Uncle Jimmy, and wonderful close, lifetime friends I’d left behind in Arlington. I missed Sheila Barton’s raucous clowning, Aunt Edna’s dulcet voice singing out, ‘Inny Ann.’ Typical of the South, she used my middle name, and it was lyrical.
My mother remonstrated my grandmother for being a crybaby and hung up. I started to cry.
“Innocence, you’re going to be just like Grandma! Stop it!” She only used my full name to beat me into compliance, a compliance that she never got. I always fought back.
“I can’t help it! I miss her! She never gets to see us! Grandpa moved her to Florida, and I don’t think she likes it there; it’s too far from her friends and family. I miss Arlington, too! All my best friends are still there, and so are Aunt Edna and Uncle Jimmy and my cousins…”
I remembered feeding the goldfish in Grandma’s giant sunroom, in her spacious home in Arlington, where I was brought up until my father returned from the Pacific after the Japanese surrendered in World War II. I was three years old. I also remember her telling me family stories about how she and my Great Aunt Anne had to become servants in their grandparents’ home after her father died from a wound received after getting kicked in the stomach while shoeing a horse.
“We were so poor that Granny Corny, which was how we referred to our great-grandmother Cornwell, only had a few pennies to spend on us for Christmas.” She looked into my eyes, by then 11 years-old, wide with expectation, for I loved to hear Grandma’s stories. “She went to the five and dime store and bought some cologne. It froze overnight, because they didn’t heat the quarters we lived in.” My young heart lurched at the thought of my grandmother suffering at such a young age. She squeezed my little hand in hers, roughened from doing so much housework, for even though Grandpa made a lot of money, he never gave her any and expected her to do all the housework, which she did without complaint. “The next morning, we ran to see our presents under a little tree she’d chopped down, only the perfume had frozen and broken the bottle it was in during the night.”
“You didn’t get any Christmas presents?” My smooth young face peered into her older, wrinkled one.
“No, the bottles were broken.”
I had never fathomed such sadness in our well-to-do family. My young heart foundered. I started to cry. Grandma looked at me and started crying, too. Then I looked at her. Seeing us both in tears made me start to laugh. Soon, she laughed at us both laughing-crying, and we continued laughing and crying until she ended up laughing and hugging me close. I’d never forget the day Grandma and I laughed and cried together as she revealed an anecdote from her impoverished childhood.
“Do something, Craig!” reverberated from the living room.
My father looked blankly at his wife, his two daughters, and couldn’t fathom what all the fuss was about. “What do you want me to do, Iris?”
“Be a man!” My mother looked at him as if she could hit him.
My father shrank back. “Now, Iris, it’s Christmas…”
The family dog wagged its tail and put its head in my mother’s lap. She petted him whilst looking out the window at the garden full of chrysanthemums and lilies blooming in December. She stood up and went into the kitchen. “Let’s eat breakfast.”
“Can we have waffles?” My sister’s face lit up at the thought of waffles and maple syrup. My father smiled at her. He loved waffles with lots of maple syrup. Daddy was easy to please.
“Yes, let’s get out the waffle iron and have a nice Christmas breakfast!”
My grandmother’s phone call forgotten, they went into the kitchen to fix waffles as I sat in the spacious living room on the chintz sofa in white Anglo-Saxon pain. My arm hurt and my heart ached. Those were physical and psychological pains. But, the pain of separation from my beloved grandmother for so many years and Albert, my lover, who had proposed marriage, were more than I could bear. That my mother was dead set against my having anything to do with him hurt even more, though I disguised it in anger.
Back in Berkeley, Albert Curtis shrugged his shoulders, opened his refrigerator, and took out a bottle of champagne. He’d decided to celebrate Christmas alone. Then, he heard a knock at the door. It was Maria Dolores. They could celebrate together.
A huge spruce tree sparkled with tinsel and expensive presents under it at State Senator Michael Dorland’s spacious Montecito mansion. His wife, Fay – his third wife, to be exact – admired the panoramic ocean view from their large front window. She turned her carefully coiffed blonde head and opened her mouth to say something, but her husband cut her short. “Quit worrying about Andronicus. It’s Christmas!” He handed her a small, oblong box, exquisitely wrapped with gold ribbons. She took it and shrugged.
“Is this a bribe?” Fay laughed. She opened it slowly, taking the diamond bracelet out with care. She smiled at her husband and kissed him. “Oh, you devil!” Then she put it on her wrist and held it up to the sparkling California morning light coming through the dormer windows. She started to look under the tree for own gift to her husband when she heard a familiar car engine pull into the semi-circular driveway in front of the tiled doorway of their home. It was a classic Spanish-style hacienda home, but Andronicus hardly cut a classic figure, disheveled with a bloodied forehead.
“Hi, Mom! Hi, Al!” he said as he threw open the door with gusto, trying to make a good show.
“Where have you been and what’s that on your forehead?” asked Fay.
“Just breezed up the coast for a change of air,” laughed Andronicus. He sat down heavily on the immense sofa opposite the Christmas tree. “Got any presents for me?”
“Andronicus! You’re hurt!”
“Do you have any presents for us?” asked his stepfather.
“Oh, uh…” Andronicus rubbed his head, wincing as he touched the raw edge of where Crutches’ metal rod had hit him.
“You certainly had the money to buy them with,” he gave his wife a stern look and stood squarely in front of his stepson.
Andronicus looked like a doe caught in headlights, frozen with fright. “I don’t have any money.”
“We do give you spending money.”
“Well, um, I spent it.”
“And helped yourself to an extra thousand from the family vault.” Al stepped closer to Andronicus and inspected him, his disheveled, torn shirt and pants and his head wound.
“I can explain…” Andronicus shifted his weight and attempted to stand, only to have his stepfather stand in his way. He burst into tears. “It’s not my fault!”
“It never is,” said Al.
“Michael, can’t you leave poor Andronicus alone? It’s Christmas Day, for heaven’s sakes.” She tugged at his new Jaeger sweater he’d just put on after opening the box under the tree.
Michael turned and glared at his wife, wondering in the back of his mind why he’d ever adopted her son. She averted her face from his cold stare, distraught.
“I don’t mind dishing out endless dough to send him to fancy schools that he flunks out of, paying his endless traffic tickets, and covering up his scandals with perfectly nice girls, but when he starts stealing from me, that’s where I draw the line!”
Fay tried to think fast, but Andronicus’ latest misdeed took her by surprise. So she gave her son an imploring look. “Andronicus, you didn’t actually take money from your father’s vault, did you?” Her voice rose on the last part of the sentence. She felt her heartbeat quicken.
“Of course not! He’s always treated me like a hand-me-down son. He picks on me all the time.” Andronicus burst into tears. A vein in his bloodied forehead bulged. He looked like hell warmed over.
“Now see what you’ve done!” Fay sat down on the silken sofa made in Italy and started to sniffle. At least, she pretended to.
Michael swiveled his stout torso and stomped out of the room. “He did it, and you know he did! Some Christmas this has turned out to be!”
Andronicus and his mother stared at each other. She narrowed her eyes. “Why did you steal money from your father’s vault, Andronicus?”
Andronicus touched his wounded forehead gingerly, saying “Ouch.” His mother ran to the bathroom to get some water to wash it with and mercurochrome to stop any infection, plus Band-aids. She washed off the wound with care, with Andronicus pushing her away, yet letting her continue. “I just did it because of… of a woman,” he said as he winced and moaned.
“The one Myrtle saw you at the Biltmore with? The older woman?”
“She’s not that old… Well, maybe she is. She wanted money!”
Andronicus’ mother quit mopping his wound and sucked in her breath. “What for?”
“For… for revenge! And sex!”
“Sex?”
Andronicus looked away. “She wanted to have sex with me. I took dad’s money to pay for the cottage behind the Biltmore.”
“Now, Andronicus, how could you get involved in a sordid affair with an old harridan? Didn’t I warn you about older women? They get so desperate…” She swabbed away at his forehead with a tiny washcloth. He shouted in pain, but she put mercurochrome on it anyway. It stung, and he yelled like a stuck pig.
“Stop it, Mother! Ouch!”
“How did you get hurt? Who hit you? Tell me the truth, Andronicus,” said Fay.
“Oh, just a little scuffle. Not worth talking about.”
Mrs. Dorland took off her horn-rimmed glasses and frowned at her son. “Andronicus, I can tell when you’re in trouble. I’m your mother. I love you and want to help you. Tell me all about it.”
Andronicus scrunched his flabby features together and let out a sniff, then another. A tear slid down his puffy cheek. His mother cradled him in her arms. He began to bawl like a baby. He pressed into his mother’s warm chest.
“Mom, she wanted me to… to kill…”
Fay Dorland raised her eyebrows and hugged him tighter.
“Who? That awful daughter of hers? I’ve heard about her.”
“No, her awful daughter’s black boyfriend.”
Fay let go of her son, breathing deeply. “Of course, you notified the police.”
Andronicus started sobbing even harder.
“You didn’t kill anyone, did you?” She took a step back, her eyes opening wide in fright. She knew her son wasn’t a murderer. A bit rough, sometimes, but, murder? No.
Andronicus continued to sob. “I didn’t kill her boyfriend.”
Fay started pacing the floor in front of their bay window with the panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. “Where does this woman live? What’s her address?”
“On Cima Linda Lane,” sniffed Andronicus with a little smile, turning the corners of his mouth up ever so slightly.
His mother grabbed her pocketbook and headed for the driveway. Andronicus listened in contentment as she roared off in her El Dorado Cadillac. His mother had always protected him. He sighed and lay down on the sofa to dry his eyes.
The Johnsons were stuffing hot buttered waffles with lots of creamy syrup on them into their mouths when the doorbell rang. They looked at one another in surprise.
“It must be Monte,” drawled my mother, annoyed. “She has no sense of propriety. It’s Christmas morning and she wants to barge in here.” She exhaled, wiped her lips with a paper napkin, stood up, and went to the door. She opened it to find a sophisticated woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses facing her.
Nonplussed, Mrs. Johnson took a step backwards, tottering a bit on the shag rug as it caught her heel.
“Who are you?”
&
nbsp; “I’m Fay Dorland, Andronicus’ mother.” Fay raised a peremptory eyebrow and stared Mrs. Johnson in the eye. The latter shook her perfectly coiffed head, bewildered.
“Andronicus who?” Mother feigned ignorance as her mind cartwheeled into the Biltmore cottage with visions of Andronicus. She felt faint. “I’m not well this morning. Could you come another day?”
“You’ve corrupted my son! He’s taken money from his father’s vault because… because you wanted him to kill someone! You’re… you’re…” Fay ran out of words to describe her feelings for his woman. “You’re going to go to jail!”
“What for?” A pallor crept over Mrs. Johnson’s face.
Mr. Johnson got up and walked over to see what the matter was. I scooted past him. I’d heard ‘I’m Andronicus’ mother’ which was enough to send chills down my spine. Andronicus Wyland? My wannabe rapist? My mother seeing him…? Anger coursed through my veins as my own mother’s betrayal sunk in. How could she? I began to sputter… “Andronicus tried to rape me last summer! He’s a brute!”
“With a mother like yours, do you expect anyone to believe that?” asked a determined Fay. She knew these were the kind of people who went after innocent kids like her son.
I stared at Andronicus’ enraged mother; then I turned and gave my own mother a withering look. She recoiled. I intuited she had done what she’d been accused of.
“Andronicus just pulled a gun on the train I was on and tried to kill me!”
My mother stepped forward, raised her head in triumph, and said, “See? He’s a killer!”
“That doesn’t make you Snow White,” replied Fay. “And I don’t believe you, young lady!”
“He raped the president of the Theta house,” I replied, standing my ground.
Fay flinched as untoward memories flowed through her brain, the bribe, the threats, what it took to get rid of that lawsuit. “How do YOU know?”
I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and said, “All of his friends know about it. It’s no secret. Your son is a rapist and… worse!” I pulled the sash on my chenille bathrobe tighter, trying to ward off the feeling of how ugly this was. I couldn’t believe my Puritanical mother had slept with Andronicus Wyland.
Rich White Americans Page 22