One Day She'll Darken

by Fauna Hodel

  “No,” they answered in unison, giggling.

  “No? Well then, let me be the first to take this opportunity to dispel any misinformation you may hear in the future from those jealous plebeians who would, without any justification, mind you, do harm to my good name and reputation.

  “My friends, of which I now include you, call me Billy, and I am an engineer, engineer extraordinaire!”

  He looked directly at Fauna, so she responded, “An engineer. Hmmm.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, and to be more specific, I am the Project Engineer for Bill Lear, responsible for establishing the design criteria for the steam turbine, among other things.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Fauna.

  “And what is your name, may I ask?”

  She hesitated, and didn’t say Pat as she normally would. “Fauna,” she began.

  He cut her off before she could say another word, “Fauna, what a wonderful name. Now that we have all that established, let’s dance.”

  She didn’t hesitate a second. His charming manner and eloquent speech captivated her at a time when she was most vulnerable. He wasn’t the most handsome man she had ever met, certainly not. He wasn’t even what you would consider good-looking. But he had magic, and it was the magic that made her tingle all over.

  They danced, and talked, and drank, and had a wonderfully exciting time together. It took all of her energy to keep from screaming with joy. Jean felt the electricity between them, and told her later that it was the fastest move she had ever seen any girl make. Jean was glad, she said, that she didn’t take Fauna along with her all the time.

  The evening went by quickly. From that first moment, she knew she was in love with him; she knew also that he would fall in love with her. She understood that if she slept with him, her marriage, which was falling apart, would surely be over. When it was time to go, he walked her outside and asked for her phone number, which she was unwilling to give.

  As he casually slid into his new Corvette, he said, “Here’s my number. If you change your mind, give me a call.”

  “I already did. When can I see ya again?”

  She was somewhat disappointed when he told her that he would be out of town on business for a week. She finally left, sizzling with excitement. She didn’t sleep the entire night. For the next week, she counted the hours waiting for him to return to Reno. She had really enjoyed being with him. He was charming, witty, intelligent and educated. His manner of speech was worlds away from the slang expressions and garbled, ghetto drawl that she had grown up with.

  Fauna wanted to improve her manners, speech, and education in order to live up to his expectations. She was not about to let him get away. He was someone special.

  The following day, still floating on air, she told everyone at work what a wonderful time she had with this man called William Sharpstein, Jr. One of the girls thought that anyone who called himself William Sharpstein, Jr., was all bullshit and decided to prove it by calling Lear personnel to check him out. The only discrepancy she found was that there was no William Sharpstein, but there was a William Sharp, an engineer assigned to turbines.

  That confirmation made her feel even more energized. Her mind went into overdrive. She contrived a plan to lure him in, not just for a short affair, but something much more. She enrolled in a correspondence course in order to qualify for a high school diploma and immediately became very conscious of the way she spoke, carefully and methodically pronouncing every word with the utmost propriety. Suddenly, wut became what, gots became have to, and PO-lice became police. Y’all was gone, too.

  The most disastrous thing in this romance would be to have this urbane and charismatic man meet her capricious Jimmie. Knowing what a different world he came from, she assumed her uncultured background would repel him.

  On the day he returned from his business trip, she was in a frenzy. More than a week of anticipation had passed, during which time she envisioned what it would be like to be married to a man with such culture and refinement, education and position. She imagined herself going to elaborate dinner parties, meeting exciting professional people, and, of course, being adored.

  To meet his expectations, it was necessary to rehearse everything for their next encounter. But when the time was at hand, their conversation was short and to the point.

  She called the number he had given her and asked, “How was your trip?”

  “Very successful. When do you think we can get together?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Within twenty minutes she was at his apartment. He met her at the curb, paid the cab fare, and opened the door for her. When they walked into his apartment, she lost control and threw herself into his arms. Any formalities gave way to their lust. The entire afternoon was spent passionately making love. She knew that her marriage to Bobby was over.

  Bobby was waiting in the kitchen, nervously. He moved from one chair to another, and then back to the counter where he stood with his arm folded. He turned and opened the refrigerator, stared at the meager contents and then closed it and sat down on one of the chairs, glancing up at the cat on the wall that stared back with the time, its tail wagging slowly. When she finally returned home more than two hours later than usual, disheveled, Bobby was standing again. He saw the fear and contempt in his wife’s eyes. “Where you been?” he asked. After five years of marriage, he knew her well enough to know that something wasn’t right. She answered sarcastically, “I was out, just like you is every other day.”

  “With who?”

  She paused a moment and glared, “Somebody who treats me the way I deserve, with respect, not taken for granted.”

  The look in his eyes turned cold. “You’ve been out with someone, on a date?”

  “What’s the difference where I was? Our marriage is a joke anyway. I decided it’s time for me to live my own life, not just exist.” She watched callously as anger filled his face. “So there ain’t no point in us staying together.”

  Before she could complete her carefully planned speech, he became enraged.

  “You white bitch! Just who you think you are? Your old drunken mammy found you in a garbage can. No one knows what type of mess you’re from. You bitch, if it weren’t for me, you would still be in a dump!”

  Bobby knew how confusing her life was, but he wanted his words to dig deep.

  He rushed into the bedroom and threw her clothes into a suitcase. His anger was controlled, but it still infused fear in his wife. Within minutes, he forced both his daughter and his wife into the car, and then drove straight to momma’s.

  “Get out!” he shouted, “Go back to the shit where you belong. You ain’t good enough for me.” He opened the trunk and threw all of her belongings onto the front yard, then sped off.

  Jimmie was on the stoop with her arms folded calmly. Fauna looked at Jimmie who appeared not too upset. She was humiliated in front of her momma, proving her right once more. She detested Bobby for it. She wanted to start a new life, leaving everything that was a reminder behind. She gave away all the belongings Bobby had thrown on the ground.

  Fauna stayed with Jimmie for about a week, and then found a small apartment for Yvette and herself. Each evening, and whenever they were free, Billy and she were together, either in his plush apartment at Amesbury Place with its manicured grounds, or at her small cubbyhole. They talked at every opportunity. As quickly as they fell in love, so they planned to live together. Before her second month’s rent was due she and Yvette moved into his apartment.

  Fauna did her best to prevent her urbane lover from meeting her momma, but her momma had too much street sense to be outfoxed. It didn’t take Jimmie long to maneuver Fauna into arranging for Billy to pick up Yvette, allowing the inevitable meeting between the past and the future to take place, whatever the consequences. She fretted most of the evening waiting for Billy to return.

  She was embarrassed to look at him as he entered the apartment shaking his head, but he was so upset it was impossible
not to. “That woman is crazy! When I knocked on her door,” Billy told Fauna, “she opened it and said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I said, ‘What?’ Then she took me completely by surprise. I tried to be polite, charming in fact. I introduced myself, and she said, ‘I don’t give a shit wut ya friends call you. Y’all the one who’s been screwin’ that white bitch, my Patta, ain’t you? Ain’t you?’ to which I finally said, ‘Yeah, that’s me!’”

  “I told her that I came to pick up the baby. You know what she said to me?”

  Fauna sunk back into the couch, her reddened face cringed with embarrassment.

  “She said, ‘You ain’t the one who put the baby in, so you ain’t the one who’s gonna get her out!’

  “Now what kind of a thing is that for a grown person to say? She’s out of her mind! We argued back and forth, back and forth. Why does she hate me? She’s never even met me before. I don’t care if I ever see that crazy again!”

  Billy had held up quite well in their first confrontation. Fauna expected him to walk into the apartment with at least a black eye, ready to dislodge her from the comfort and safety of his home. But he was gentle and understanding. He saw Fauna as a person, not as a “race.” She began her transformation and Billy was the catalyst.

  “I tried to tell you, my momma’s set in her way, she either likes you or she don’t,” Fauna said.

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah, she says what’s on her mind. Straight out. She don’t pull no punches.”

  “She doesn’t pull any punches,” Billy corrected her.

  “Yeah, of course, I meant to say she doesn’t pull any punches.”

  “Do you know what else she said to me?” Billy said. “She told me that she felt sorry for Bobby, that I got in the way of a perfectly good marriage, and that no high sadity nigger’s gonna corrupt her daughter and take away her granddaughter. I don’t know what high sadity means, but I got the gist.”

  Fauna dropped her head into her hands fearing that Billy was about to give up on their relationship and send her back to Momma’s. Billy knelt down in front of Fauna and gently pulled her hands away. “Hey, I know this has nothing to do with me. Your momma’s probably afraid of losing you to me. She’s just jealous and that’s the way she reacts.”

  “How do you know so much?” Fauna asked.

  Billy just shrugged his shoulders and kissed her on the forehead, then said, “I don’t know anything about any of this, other than the little you told me about her. But I want to know everything about you, about how you came to live with her in the first place.”

  She hesitated for a long while, deciding whether or not to empty her heart by unloading all the secrets she harbored about her race and her family. She guessed he would either freak and disappear forever, or stay and understand. In either case, her history was too heavy, too convoluted to keep private any longer. She gambled on his sincerity, and told him everything. He was fascinated by how she had come to live with a black family, and how she had done everything possible to make herself, and everyone else, believe she was black. Fauna told Billy all she had learned about Marion, Tamar, George, Dorothy, and the phone conversations, the letters. Billy was the first person Fauna told of her true identity. He was intrigued and excited. Billy encouraged her to continue, not to give up her search, and offered to help in any way possible. His enthusiasm was all she needed. His logical mind organized all of the incidents quickly. Together they decided to try to find some of the answers that had plagued her for so many years.

  CHAPTER 21

  I met a man

  Who told me

  I don’t see you as white,

  I only see

  A sensitive soul.

  Slowly, I started my entrance

  Into a living world

  Fauna felt the stability within her provincial reality slipping. She relinquished the security of the only lifestyle with which she was familiar, that of a poor female from a black quarter. It defined her insular existence since she was born, and now it was all a lie. She changed jobs and abandoned her husband and home to be entangled with a man that she barely knew, while avoiding the family that raised her. The anxiety only intensified when she learned that the clan who perpetrated this fraud and discarded her, concealed secrets that now engrossed her, the most haunting of which was that she was not black. In the past, when times were difficult, Homer was always there for her. But Fauna had stayed away from the Esquire far too long.

  Six months had gone by since Fauna had last spoken with Homer. Although he tried to reach her many times, Fauna avoided him. She was no longer proud of her father who shined the shoes of strangers. Her embarrassment prevented her from telling Billy. Instead, she hurt Homer, the kindliest person she had ever known, rather than harm her chances of moving upward to a better life.

  Fauna’s absence was far more distressing to Homer than it was to her. In her quest for something, Fauna became insensitive to Homer’s tender feelings. He asked nothing of her, yet always attended to her welfare. Deep inside, she knew he was heartbroken.

  When the guilt overwhelmed her soul, and she could no longer live this lie, Fauna went to the shoeshine stand and met with her beloved Homer. He was alone, sitting in the worn-out leather chair that Fauna had spent so much time on as a child, listening intently to a baseball game, unaware of her approach, just the way Fauna always remembered him.

  “Homer,” Fauna called.

  He looked up at her with such saddened eyes that it hurt her to return the glance. “Pat! Pat! How yo’ been?” He turned down the radio. “What a surprise this is. Let’s take a look at you.” He gave her a quick once over. They stared at each other for a moment and then, as if they both felt the same tender ache, threw their arms about each other in heartfelt embrace.

  “I’ve missed you, Homer.”

  “How’s comes you stayed away so long, Pat? Did I do something wrong?” His voice was weak and raspy.

  “Oh no, it wasn’t you, not at all. I just felt . . . well there were so many things that were going on.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “You know, things, things with Bobby and Jimmie. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah, I know how she is” shaking his head in disgust.

  “Homer,” Fauna gently held his hand, “Why’d you stay with Jimmie so long?”

  “That woman’s sick, Pat. Mental. Oh, at first she was a good lookin’ woman—the prettiest I’d ever see’d. But I should of know’d she got a temper—saw it right from the beginning. She got a mean streak a mile long. Jealous too! Imagine, that woman jealous a me, a crippled-up old nigger who’s old enough to be her father. She was feisty, all right. Ooooweeee!

  “Then you came along. If it weren’t fo’ you being such a delicate little thing, I would of left her a long time ago—maybe gone back to my own kids in California, I don’t know. But she’s too wild and much too dangerous to be taking care a little four-year-old, especially one that’s as light-skinned as you.

  “I couldn’t leave y’all alone with that woman—somebody had to protect you, somebody gots to make sure that nothin’ bad happened to you. I did the bests I could, Pat.”

  “I know you did, Homer,” Fauna said as tears rolled from her cheeks, “You’re the only one I can count on. The only one I really trust.” He reached out and wiped her face with his thumb and she held his weathered hand close to her face.

  “I’m gettin’ tired, Pat. You’re a grown woman now, with a family of ya own to take care of.” He put his head down. “I can’t stop her no more. I’m too old to be fightin’ and I don’t want to do it no more.”

  Fauna stayed with him for the remainder of the day, until closing time, and then they walked together just like when Fauna was a little girl. He limped along, listening to his radio, while Pat teased him. They reminisced about the many times he slyly intervened when Jimmie was about to lose her temper, and all the times he took her to school, and the PTA meetings, especially the first time he met her teacher—
he loved to tell that story—and she listened again as if it were the first time.

  “You remember that first day when the parents came to school?” he asked. “Your Momma didn’t want to go, so she asked me to go for her—to meet your teachers and all. Well, I said okay, and off we went to school, just you and me. But when we got there, you just ran off ahead of me and left me in the dust. I felt so bad, I thought you was ashamed of me. That’s the way we grew up in the South. No one was proud of a Negro. Specially no little girl looking as white as you did.”

  “I remember it like it was yesterday,” Fauna said.

  “Later on I found out that you ran ahead just to tell everyone that your poppa was coming and you was as proud as a peacock. I felt a lot better after that.”

  They laughed together out loud. But inside she cried, knowing how much she missed of life by not spending more time loving this wonderful man.

  Fauna promised never to stay away so long, but her promise was short-lived. In less than ten days he was admitted to the hospital. A man who had never been ill in his entire life was now dying of lung cancer. Fauna vowed to make up for all the time she had wasted by staying at his side at every available moment.

  Jimmie received the news in her usual hysterical manner. Because of her brief stay in the hospital a year earlier, she regarded herself as the family medical expert, no matter what the illness.

  Although the weather was unseasonably cold the day Jimmie visited Homer for the first time, she refused to not be noticed and wore a tight pink dress with large white polka dots the size of oranges. Her head was covered by a black silk headpiece with a wide brim and tall crown that had a long, bright, red ribbon. The ribbon wrapped around and tailed off to her left shoulder. The matching black patent leather shoes with red leatherette bows and she carried a small black purse that made her look out of place even in an era of disco. It was a noticeable contrast to the white uniforms of the hospital personnel. She entered the ward strutting like a movie star at a premiere. Jimmie halted her entrance and glanced around to the three other patients lying immobile in their hygienic beds, all too ill to even look up. She lifted her chin and marched over to Homer’s bedside.