Rodney was proud of his brother.
They talked about opening a firm together after Jerry finished law school, one that would serve colored people who couldn’t afford an attorney. They spent hours discussing that dream.
Jerry had a girlfriend, a beautiful girl named, Sarah, from Denham Springs who was a junior and also wanted to go to law school. Jerry said she made all A’s and wouldn’t have a problem with the LSAT. He and Sarah were already talking about marriage. Jerry said, “When you know, you just know,” which, Rodney told Marianne, made him think about me. I was the one secret he kept from his brother. What was there to tell, anyway?
Jerry thought Rodney should ask Annette to marry him. When Jerry questioned why Rodney was dragging his feet, the older brother just said he wasn’t ready and he wasn’t sure if she was the right one. Jerry didn’t pressure Rod, but he really liked Annette, who had become close friends with Sarah.
“Do you think you’d want to marry her if she went to law school?” Jerry asked one evening as they sat at Sammy’s Grille listening to the Platters and the Four Tops on the jukebox. Rodney laughed.
“That has nothing to do with it. If she’s happy teaching, that’s fine with me.”
“What then?” Jerry asked. Man of few words.
“I’m not sure she’s the one, Jer.”
“What do you need to be sure?”
“How do you know Sarah is the one?”
“I just know.”
“Well, I’m waiting until I know.”
“I’m your brother. Explain.”
“She’s great girl, don’t get me wrong. But there’s some missing. Maybe it’ll develop.”
“Oh.” That’s all Jerry said. Rodney felt Sarah had put his brother up to the interrogation.
Rodney told Marianne that it didn’t bother him that Jerry would try to get information for Sarah. Rodney said he would have done the same thing for me. Marianne told me later. “Ah! I didn’t think about Annette, but Susie, when I thought about what I’d do.” His said his life with Jerry had always been like that—ah ha moments of wisdom, that Jerry was born a wise, old soul. Rodney depended on him. He knew Jerry depended on him, too.
“Other than Susie,” Rodney told Marianne, “I don’t think there’s anyone I love more than Jerry.
“Hey, you there?” Jerry asked, interrupting Rodney’s thoughts. Jerry sat next to Rodney on the edge of the bed. “What’s bugging you?”
“It’s Annette.”
“Well?”
“She says she’s pregnant.” Jerry stood up and faced Rodney.
“You didn’t tell me y’all were ... uh, you know.”
“We aren’t, weren’t, don’t. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Then who’s she pregnant for?”
“She says it’s mine.”
“Well? Is it or not?”
“Look, I don’t remember having sex with her but she says I did.”
“I can tell you this, if I ever had sex with Sarah, I’d remember it.”
“That’s what I thought, too. She says I was drunk and we did it.”
“Did you?”
“Well, I got drunk, yes. At that boucherie her parents threw for me. And she took me to see the boat house. We kissed a couple times then I told her I was dizzy. Or that’s what I thought happened. I woke up the next morning in bed with her. We were both naked.”
“But you don’t remember the sex part?”
“No, the last thing I remember was her kissing me and sticking her tongue down my throat and saying it was the only way she could get me to do it with her.”
“That sounds fishy. You remember those details, but you don’t remember having sex.”
“Yup. It doesn’t feel right, but I was drunk, so I don’t know what happened and she was there and says it did.”
“What did you say when she told you she was pregnant.”
“Crap. What do you think I said? That I’d have to think about it. It was a shock, still is.”
“What did she say?”
“She cried and said I was calling her a liar and that it was my baby.” Jerry moved to his own bed so he could face Rodney, their knees were almost touching. Rodney told Jerry about his conversation with Marianne. “Mari said to tell her I’d marry her before the baby comes and to wait it out. Marianne thinks Annette is trying to coerce me into marrying her, that she’s not really pregnant. And Mari said the same thing you just said, ‘You’d remember if you had sex with her.’”
“Have you ever had sex, Rod?” Jerry looked directly into Rodney’s bloodshot eyes that seemed about to fill with tears.
“Yes.”
“With whom?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You think I don’t know about Susanna Burton?”
“What? What are you talking about.”
“Look, Rod, if you don’t want to talk to me about it, okay. But don’t think I’m stupid.” Rodney stared to cry. Jerry had never seen him cry and Rod was embarrassed but he couldn’t stop himself. He felt so frustrated—Susie, Annette, a baby. He was screwed.
“Listen bro. I’ll have Sarah get to the bottom of this. She and Annette are best friends and girls talk. Let me see what I can find out, okay?” Rodney shrugged his shoulders. His face was buried in his hands. He didn’t look up.
Chapter Sixteen
Susie Moving On
1970
I’D BEEN BACK IN New York a couple of weeks when I got sick, really sick. It was a stomach virus and I couldn’t stop throwing up. One day my roommate found me on the floor, out cold. She called the rector who called the housemother who called an ambulance. I found all of this out later, of course. When I woke up I was in a hospital with an IV in my arm, feeling somewhat better.
My doctor was a handsome resident named Josh Ryan. He couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than me and had sandy hair, wavy and a little daring, long enough in the back that it flipped up on his collar. I guess you could say Josh, I mean Dr. Ryan, was sexy. I liked him right off. He sat on the side of my bed, his leg pulled up and bent at the knee so that his thigh touched my side through the bed sheet.
“Well, well, Miss Burton,” he said. He had a sideways grin and eyes that laughed when he talked. I felt like he was laughing at me, but I wasn’t uncomfortable. “You’ve been a busy little girl, now haven’t you?” I didn’t know what he meant. I guess he read the confusion in my expression.
“So you don’t know?”
“Know what?” His smile faded and a seriousness wiped over him.
“Oh.” He took my hand in both of his. “You are pregnant, Susie. May I call you Susie?” I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to shut my eyes, to shut out the news, but I couldn’t do that, either. I lay there with my mouth half opened, my eyes wide as if I’d seen a ghost. My hands trembled. I knew he felt them quiver inside his surgeon’s hands.
“Pregnant?”
“Yep. Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Uh. You wouldn’t know him.” My voice trailed off. “We broke up.” I whispered, but he heard me.
“Oh. That’s not good. I’ll give you some time to think about this, to decide what you want to do.”
“Do?”
“Yes, you have choices, of course.”
“Choices?” He was right. I needed some time to think. How far along, I wondered to myself. Thanksgiving to now, seven-eight weeks. Still early.
“I can refer you to an obstetrician.”
“How much time do I have?”
“You sound like you’re dying. You’re not. You’re just having a baby.”
“I can’t have a baby.” That was one thing I knew for sure. I couldn’t have Rodney’s baby. Not now. Maybe not ever. My daddy would kill me. Literally. And the Klan would kill Rodney. And what would happen to this baby?
“Well, I can’t tell you what to do, but I can remind you that abortio
n is against the law. You could put the baby up for adoption.”
“I can’t have this baby. I can’t put this baby up for adoption. That won’t work.” He looked confused and I couldn’t explain to him that no one would want a mixed-race baby. When Dr. Ryan left my room I cried and cried and couldn’t calm myself down. I wanted to call Rodney and tell him, ask him to come to New York and marry me. Make a respectable woman out of me. But, of course, that would ruin his life.
I couldn’t have an abortion. I was Catholic. I’d go to hell, for sure, if I wasn’t already destined for Hades because I’d had sex—and not just sex, but sex with a colored boy. I didn’t know what to do. The next day when Dr. Ryan came to see me we talked. He asked me if I’d decided what I was going to do. I hadn’t.
The following day he came in and told me I would be discharged later that day. He gave me a prescription for anti-nausea medicine and some warnings about self-care—drink lots of fluids, eat regularly, try to keep my meals down, and relax. Being pent up was bad for the baby—and me. When the nurse rolled me towards the front door of the hospital in a wheel chair, Dr. Ryan caught up with us and took over the nurse’s duties. He asked me how I was getting back to campus. When I told him I was taking a cab, he insisted on taking me back to my dorm in his two-seater convertible. We stopped for a drink. He had a beer, I had iced tea. He warned me about alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes and stress. A few days later he called to check up on me and asked me if I’d like to get some dinner. He said he wanted to make sure I was eating. I met him at a burger joint near campus.
“Look,” he said after he ate his burger and I picked at mine. It smelled like onions and I wanted to puke, but I held it together. “I know you’re in a jam. Do you have anyone you can tell about this? Your mother or father, a sibling, a close friend—the daddy.” I shook my head, No.
I’m not sure how things happened between me and Josh Ryan. I was in quite a state, had no one, and he was there for me. I think I’d have died without him. After a few weeks I knew he was falling in love with me, but I had no control over his feelings. I had enough trouble managing my own. With Rodney’s baby growing inside me, I didn’t have space in my heart for another being. I sort of rolled with the flow. When I look back on that time I realize I’d sort of spaced out, operated in the clouds, put one foot in front of the other and tried not to think or feel.
The spring semester flew by and I didn’t really start to show until the end of May when no one seemed to care during summer classes. I worked in the English Department where I graded papers and read essays and rocked along with only adjunct professors on staff. They didn’t know whether I was married and didn’t ask.
One Monday I called the English Department and told them I was sick. Other than the two days in the hospital it was the first time I’d done that and no one seemed to notice. I had an appointment in Manhattan with an agency that handled “unorthodox” adoptions. It was hard for me, being from the Deep South, to realize couples who wanted mixed-race babies existed—but they did, and I was able to interview several before I selected the perfect parents for the baby I carried—a white professor at Columbia and his attorney wife. The concept of open adoption was new and unusual, but it seemed the right thing for me and this brilliant child I’d be bringing into the world.
The thing I wrestled with most was that this baby was a product of my love for Rodney and his for me. To give her-him-it, away felt like I was giving up on our relationship, our love for each other. In essence, I guess I was. It was a decision I had to make.
I went into labor the last day of summer classes, as if I’d timed it—August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, I thought, ironically. I was so scared when my water broke, I called Josh and he told me to take a cab to the emergency department and he’d meet me there. He was waiting when I arrived and ushered me directly to a delivery room. I squeezed his hand and tried to breathe with the contractions. He was encouraging and assuaged my fears so that, at times, I was laughing at some of the silly things he said.
The pain was intense, but as soon as I heard the baby cry, nothing else mattered. I started to cry, too, as Josh lay the tiny naked infant across my stomach, its cord still attached to my body. Joseph and Emalene came into the room to cut the cord and hold the baby and I detached myself as best I could. I tried to find joy in watching the couple ooh and ahh over the miracle they held, their dreams to have a family finally realized after fifteen years. A girl!
Josh had not met the adoptive couple—in fact I’d just told him about them a few days before the birth, but I hadn’t mentioned the race thing. I watched him look at the beautiful colored woman who held this baby Josh and I had nurtured together for more than seven months and his facial expressions changed from surprise to anger to something I couldn’t detect. He walked out of the room without a word to me or anyone else.
My emotions were flooded with thoughts of Rodney, separation from our baby, happiness for Joe and Emalene, wonder at Josh’s reaction. I turned on my side and sobbed until I fell asleep. When I awoke I was alone in my hospital room. Two days later I was discharged.
I had to move on. Sentimentality would get in my way of me achieving freedom. I had to finish college so I could be on my own. I didn’t forget her, our baby. I thought about her constantly.
On August 15, 1971 I received a picture of an amber-eyed toddler with light brown curls corkscrewed to her head and fastened away from her round face with a huge pink bow. Her smile was a big, toothless, “O,” as she held onto a coffee table, totally proud of herself for standing. I cried all day, then I called Emalene, who told me I was welcome to visit if I felt I could handle it. I thought about that for a long time.
*
By my third year at Sarah Lawrence I’d decided to major in International Relations and Creative Writing. I wanted to write books and see the world, maybe write books about the world and about Catfish’s world.
I didn’t go home for Christmas that year. I knew it would be too painful to be there and not see Rodney, and I still had residual postpartum depression. I was afraid he would know, just by looking at me.
Rodney continued to write and call, but the letters and phone conversations became fewer and farther between until, gradually he faded into a sweet memory of first love, first kiss, first sex, first everything. Or at least I tried to push him back to that memory section of my brain.
I read all the current magazine articles about relationships. I learned that girls needed to get through their first love to understand how it worked. We could use the lessons from the that experience to make the next ones better. I had learned a lot by loving and being loved by Rodney Thibault.
I figured Rodney was dating other girls since I hadn’t heard from him in months. I hoped he was dating colored girls, girls he could take home to meet his parents and in whose homes he would be welcomed. He would never have that with me.
I started to date too, after I recovered and realized Josh Ryan was out of my life. My friends and roommates set me up with a few guys from some of the universities in and around New York. I’d meet them for coffee, go to football games and to an occasional fraternity party. By spring, I noticed that a Connecticut boy, Gavin McClendon, had been asking me out regularly and the other boys had backed off. I liked Gavin. He was intelligent, funny and very handsome. By my senior year Gavin and I were an item. He took me to his fraternity parties and formals at Yale University and he escorted me to the few functions at Sarah Lawrence I cared about attending. The schools were about an hour apart by train.
Gavin asked me to be his date for his senior fraternity formal at the Plaza Hotel in NYC. The Yale KA formal was a big deal to the girls at Sarah Lawrence. They ogled over me because I would be attending, and they obsessed about what I would wear. Only one other SL girl had been invited, a girl engaged to a KA.
Gavin took the train to Yonkers that Saturday morning and picked me up in a cab. The Plaza was a magical place. We arrived and were escorted i
nto an elevator by a bellman who looked like he was dressed to march in the Nutcracker parade. Later I learned that Gavin had stopped at the Plaza and checked in before he came to Sarah Lawrence. He said he didn’t want me to feel uncomfortable standing in the lobby while he registered. I was impressed with his thoughtfulness, especially since I had misgivings about staying in a hotel room with him, or any guy, for that matter. Any guy except Rodney, but it had been almost two years since I’d been in one with him.
I was nervous at first. Then, when Gavin opened the door and I entered the living room of the huge apartment with Persian rugs and French Provincial furniture, I relaxed. I walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Next door was Bergdorf Goodman, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Saks Fifth Avenue. From the outside, the Plaza looked like a castle and I felt like a princess.
I thought the moment the door closed and we were alone, I’d freak out, but Gavin had arranged for me to have a massage and mineral bath in the spa, so I was whisked away and left him in the suite. Later he met me for tea in the famed Palm Court. The magic increased as the day moved on.
My skin was clear and shiny after the facial and, with no make-up, I felt conspicuous in the famous Plaza Tea Room, but Gavin told me he thought I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. I blushed and we sipped champagne and talked about school, graduation and plans for graduate school. It was like a dream and I was being swept away by a handsome, considerate guy who was easy to be with and about as thoughtful as any man I’d known. I guess it was easy to be thoughtful when you had as much money as Gavin, but who was counting?
Back upstairs in the suite, Gavin ushered me into the elegant French-styled bedroom to use the bathroom with gold-plated fixtures. He told me to take my time then he left me alone to dress for the dance. I soaked in the huge garden tub, piled high with bubbles, shaved my legs and underarms, shampooed my hair and dried off with an Italian cotton towel the size of a bed sheet. When I stepped into the living room in my silver form-fitted formal, a slit revealing my left leg, Gavin gasped. I smiled.
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