The Wedding Read online

  Preacher sang louder to cover his crying. Over and over he sang, “May the Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent one from another. Go with my blessing. Go with God.” Isaac’s waving hand trailed out the window, and Preacher followed it with his eye until he could see only a trail of smoke.

  Their parting was not unique. All over the South such sacrificial scenes were taking place, the giving of gifted colored children to the North where their mettle could be tested, their potential realized. Most of them would always be exiles. No free man returns to the yoke, but the South that was in them was in them to stay. What lingered was not the harshness of its whites, or the hovels of its blacks, but the beauty of its land, the abundance of its beauty. That remembered child, waking to the morning of the South, and rushing out to fling his arms around its rich scents, its rustling wood, its tapestry of color—that child, now man grown, spends the rest of his life pretending that he prefers the memory of some other place. For his children, yes, for his ambition, yes, for his self-respect, yes, but for his remembering there is no sweeter memory than the South.

  Preacher lingered on the platform, sad but not sorrowful. His son had given him much joy, and the tears in his eyes were tears of loss, but they were also tears of pride and hope. He finally turned away from the empty tracks. He had given much of his life to the healing of souls, and now he had given up his only son so that someday he could learn how to heal with a different science.

  When the train got to Washington, Miss Amy fetched Isaac, buying him a ticket for her parlor car. He brought his paper sack of food with him. He’d saved the best pickings for Miss Amy, who had got on board the train back home with no sign of a parcel that looked like food. Miss Amy thanked him for his thoughtfulness but explained that they would eat hot meals in the dining car. She gave his greasy sack to a porter to dispose of, sensing that a colored porter would prefer this delicate cover of disparagement to her telling him right out from her fancy seat in the parlor car to take her white folks trash to some poor mother in the coach.

  Isaac entered the Chestnut Hill home of Miss Amy and her father as her protégé. He ate his meals with them, and learned his manners from them, and served as a servant of sorts. He slept on a separate floor with the colored servants, old retainers who were set in their duties and jealous of sharing them. They relinquished such a meager portion of chores to Isaac that it was child’s play to complete them, but Miss Amy was satisfied that he was improving his character by working his way through school, if only nominally.

  Miss Amy sent Isaac to the day school that her married brother had attended as a boy, convinced that his mind would rot in public school. She remained militant about the right of colored children to free education, but she believed that in Boston public schools, crowded as they were with children of Irish immigrants, the level of excellence expected would fall far beneath the high-water mark she set for Isaac.

  When Isaac’s spring term ended, he found himself going with Miss Amy and her father to a distant island. It was an impossibly grand adventure for a backwoods boy whose only experience of islands was as places for shipwrecks in stories. That they were going on a vacation made the journey even more of an unknown adventure. He knew about visits—they were trips you took to see somebody sick or bury somebody dead. But a vacation was going someplace just to be going someplace, and having a place to live in once you got there. And the place! It was a sprawling four-story affair, blue with white shutters, with a big porch for sitting; the idea that a house this size would sit empty for eight months out of the year was beyond Isaac’s ken.

  They had only been on the island a day when they had to take the carriage down to the dock to fetch Miss Amy’s brother and his family, who had come for their annual reunion with Miss Amy’s father. Miss Amy’s brother had moved to California some years ago, his sensibilities never having quite adjusted to New England’s aridity, nor his temperament to the prudishness of the Boston well to do. The cross-country trek with four children, trunks, pets, a nurse, a personal maid, and a wife who would have preferred to flaunt her Parisian dresses in a more fashionable locale was long, tedious, and hardly worth it, except that Miss Amy’s father was old enough to change his will on a whim.

  Isaac slept alone, in a bedroom on the top floor. In this way he lived at a remove from the other children, and also in that Miss Amy made sure that he had sufficient chores to keep his character from succumbing to summer wilt. Her brother was more lax, as was his nature, and Miss Amy regretted that his brood fell outside of her jurisdiction. But Isaac ate with the other children, learned to swim with them, and spent as much time as he could riding beside them in their pony cart. Though they knew that he was colored, they were still too young to know that they should care. His copper skin was scarcely darker than their own summer-tanned faces, his manners had certainly been more strictly supervised, and his accent was well on its way to being indistinguishable from the speech he was exposed to at school and at home.

  Isaac loved the island, which in the 1880s showed no advance signs of the coming century of cars and cocktail parties and colored people above the servant class. The carriages and pony carts enhanced the island’s charm without really increasing its pace. City ways were left behind. Innocence walked barefoot down every dirt road. There were hay rides and boating, lawn croquet and lemonade, days spent picking in the woods when the blueberries ripened, clambakes and the fire company’s band serenading the summer night. Where the Norton children went, Isaac went too, and the Norton children went everywhere, with their pony cart, their sailboat, their secret tree house, their lemonade parties (held on the glassed-in porch when it rained). Wherever they were, it was lonesome someplace else.

  The strong will of many a determined New England mother was sooner or later dissolved by the sight of her deserted child scuffing the dirt in front of his door, ordered to stay behind while the rest of the lively herd went off on some adventure with the Norton children and “a boy whose ancestors ate each other.” The trouble was that Isaac never showed his cannibal side. There was nothing about him to make children shy away. A little boy born with copper skin set down amid a swarm of little boys with copper skin on summer loan was almost impossible to single out unless some overcurious mother were to make the ridiculous request, “Will the real copper boy go home.”

  Isaac was part of it all until the year he turned fourteen. In the winter of that year Miss Amy’s father died, and in the summer of that year the Norton children were taken to Europe. Their island visits were over, their father no longer bound by his own greed to make an annual pilgrimage to the keeper of the purse. There was no need, for he had won: the family textile mills were all his. With them he bought an ambassadorship. Now a member of the really rich, he wanted something outside the reach of the merely rich, who only stay rich by never touching their principal. For the really rich, who can buy anything, and have already bought it, an ambassador’s title—with no cash required but the profuse spending of it implied—was life’s ne plus ultra.

  The will left Miss Amy some coupons to clip and the family houses as legacy, which was no more and no less than her spinsterhood expected. She could keep herself in comfort in the only two places where she felt at home. She wanted the familiar; her brother wanted the foreign. He wanted more, and he got it, but what is the measure of contentment?

  That summer, Isaac and Miss Amy made the passage to Martha’s Vineyard as they always had. The rambling summer house felt empty, though, and somehow foreboding. Other things had changed on the island as well. Without the Norton children, and their pony cart and sailboat—both sold because neither Miss Amy nor Isaac could think of a sensible reason why a poor boy working his way through school should be saddled with their upkeep—Isaac was without the ballast that heretofore had kept him afloat in a sea of maternal misgivings. Now the island’s mothers threatened dire punishment, the loss of precious privileges and worse, to any whiny gutless child who had no stomach for snubbing Isaac. There wa
s no time to let him down lightly. He was taller by a head than he had been the previous summer, and his voice had lost its limp innocence. Over the winter this playful dog had grown wolf-sized, his nature unpredictable. The children’s safe world was now imperiled, and the protective instinct of a mother compelled her to keep her charge at a distance.

  A group of mothers made an afternoon call on Miss Amy. They arrived in a neighborly and friendly fashion, in accordance with the unwritten rule that summer was not officially in season until the Norton house was open and its occupants receiving. With their mouths appropriately at half mast, the mothers paid their respects to the memory of Miss Amy’s dear departed father. With their mouths smiling like watermelon slices and their voices climbing over one another to outdo each other’s eagerness, they trilled their pleasure at her brother’s exciting rise to an equally impressive realm. Tea was poured, and they sipped it more and more slowly. No one wanted to be the first to have to start. The stones they had brought to throw at Isaac grew heavy in their hands.

  A silence fell that the sipping couldn’t fill. A throat was cleared, but courage faltered. Another throat started to emit a sound but changed its course to coughing. Waves of embarrassment rolled over the room. Then one red-faced woman whose pounding eardrums gave her the sensation of drowning in a terrible sea flung her stones and floated free. Stone after righteous stone was thrown until the helter-skelter pile rolled back the tide. Whoever saved herself had saved her child, her girl child, from a fate worse than drowning—a life not worth living. They saw their cause as just, and they felt they had presented it tellingly, especially since Miss Amy did not challenge it.

  But Miss Amy would never have stooped to reply to the women’s insults, as they should have known. If she kept quiet, it was because there was no way for her to be as sure of their daughters as she was of Isaac. When she was asked if the matter could now be considered disposed of, forgotten, she said that it could be. Relieved, and in haste to change the subject, no one thought to ask her if it would be. It would neither be forgotten nor forgiven. Miss Amy’s summers on the island were already reduced, saddened by fleeting memories of other years and other children. Now these women had taken the only child Miss Amy had left and twisted him into a savage shape with their mouths.

  Miss Amy saw the mothers to the door, giving no sign that she would never invite them to cross its threshold again. Nor would she cross theirs. But as the days advanced no sign was needed to spell out the obvious. The mothers dismissed their worries, deciding that Miss Amy’s retreat from their tea tables was due to her delicate concern that her mourning dress might cast a pall over their parlors. They kept in touch by sending over broths and custards accompanied by calling cards inscribed with the hope that she was feeling better, though no one had it from any authority that she was feeling ill.

  Isaac accepted his separation from the camaraderie of summer with the stoicism that was part of his school’s curriculum, and part of a colored child’s nature. He learned to live inside himself earlier than other people do (and some people never do). He learned to count his blessings and take everything else in stride. The premature end of his childhood illusions did have one very sweet compensation, though: every Friday he was allowed to take Miss Amy for an afternoon drive in her elegant little phaeton. His hand promptly became adept at holding the reins of her beautiful, spirited, fast-stepping bay. It was a bigger summer bonus than jogging about in a slowpoke pony cart that couldn’t go half the places that a real horse and carriage could go with ease and get there twice as quickly, and Miss Amy knew it. She rode beside him, not telling him what to do because she saw that he knew.

  Perhaps some cosmic force saw and approved the parallel paths two horses trotted down: Isaac, with his beloved Miss Amy at his side, and Hannibal, with Gram at his back. The hack Melisse had hired perhaps rattled along a bit more unsteadily than Miss Amy’s phaeton, and Gram’s stories to Josephine of the golden days of her childhood that Hannibal soaked in were touched with a sadness whose depth Miss Amy’s tales never approached. And Miss Amy did not embellish her accounts, except as the remembering eye adds height and breadth to everything. Miss Amy rode in a smooth continuum of time never torn from the calendar by war. Her way of life would die of natural causes; she would not even live to see it. Gram’s way of life, though, had been cut down in its bloom. The flower of the South had rotted in the slime of slavery, the root no substance to the stalk, and the stalk suddenly obscenely ejaculating until it lay limp and self-abused in a burial of petals. Gram had pressed those petals between the papers of her memory before they could be swept away by the winds of war that sucked up everything else.

  And so as Isaac sat beside Miss Amy, the gifted and the giver, Hannibal sat in his separated seat, coachman to Miss Caroline. Yet Gram, without lifting a finger except to point to the spot where Hannibal was to serve the ladies their picnic lunch, without contributing a dime or being disposed to let so much as a penny go to waste on Hannibal’s potential, without one kind word of encouragement or advice, Gram was in her way as inspiring to Hannibal as Miss Amy was to Isaac. Isaac became what Miss Amy had foreseen; Hannibal became what Gram had to see to believe.

  Occasionally Miss Amy let Isaac have free rein with the carriage, and when she did he drove them far and wide. He sensed that after this summer he would never come again to this jewel of the Atlantic, though he never dared question Miss Amy regarding the future, nor did she volunteer any information. If this was to have been the summer of his unrestrained passion, it was the island that received it. No woman would ever have as many facets for him as its sea, as many surprises and treasures as its highlands and lowlands, as much enduring beauty, as much quiet grace. His capacity for love, made to seem brutish and shameful by Miss Amy’s neighbors, could now never surrender its self-control to lower levels of fulfillment. When he was ready for a wife, he might feel for her in the hide of his body, but in the New England overlay of his mind he would never admit to her existence. His tryst with the island, in the summer he came into puberty, was one of the few romantic adventures of which he would have total and tender recall in the winter of old age when forgetfulness torments the day and only the unforgettable orients the mind.

  At summer’s end Isaac packed his clothes and his boy’s belongings for the trip back to Boston. This time he left no token behind as he had in other years, in company with the other children who firmly believed they were leaving a talisman to ensure their return. He was through with childish acts and childish hopes. Next summer he would be fifteen, old enough to stay alone in the city, and big enough, if he kept growing, to get a man’s job and a man’s pay. He had watched the red-capped porters in busy South Station on his way to and from the island—middle-aged men for the most part, their backs bent, their faces bubbling with sweat, on a treadmill trot on tired flat feet.

  In this heyday of the railroad’s prosperity, with motorcars and airplanes scarcely dreamed of, the parlor cars were the mobile drawing rooms of the rich, and the black men who served them as waiters or porters or redcaps received extravagant tips for their coldly calculated servilities. All of their bowing and scraping was directed toward an end that justified the means. They saved their tips, and sent their sons to high school; they saved their tips, and started little businesses. Though generations to come might gloss over these beginnings, this was the beginning of the colored middle class. In Isaac’s hometown the tiny station had been a way stop, with one train passing a day that nobody got off of and only a few ragged colored people heading North got on, and redcaps with extended palms were unnecessary and unknown. In South Station, though, a smart-stepping boy could earn himself enough in the summer to send himself to school in the winter. If he could stomach the servility, a man could ensure his future.

  Settling down to sleep on his last night on the island—his decision made, his mind content with the fact that Miss Amy would no longer have to have him as her summer problem—Isaac did not dream a boyish dream of someday r
eturning in triumph, world-renowned physician to presidents, kings, and ambassadors, and rich enough to have a carriage of his own drawn by two Arabian horses, in which he drove Miss Amy scornfully past all the kneeling neighbors who beseeched him for cures. And maybe he would open his doctor’s bag for them, and maybe he wouldn’t. He did not dream this dream of fame and riches. Even in his subconscious he served no other god but Asclepius, and Asclepius was a jealous god, even more so than immortal Mammon.

  There had never been any question, any doubt, about Isaac’s becoming a doctor. Preacher had made God a vow, and the moment Isaac leaped from his mother’s mutilated womb, a man-child strong in limb and lung, he was hostage to that vow. Preacher carried in his mouth the pearl of Christ, and he passed it on to Isaac, and with it a compassion which never corrupted itself by sifting among the sick for the heaviest purse. Even at this young age, Isaac looked on medicine as a personal challenge. He had seen the puny die and the strong live. As a child in the South he had known children too sickly to play, too sickly to know that life offered nothing better than the joy of living. He was made for this life, and not just because Preacher had breathed it into him from his first days of understanding. There was the time during his adolescence when he had held a small trembling bird in the power of his hand and watched as it flew high and far away, its broken wing mended and its trembling halted—able to fend for itself once more as a result of his care. From this, Isaac learned the power of his hands, and he also learned that to be whole was to have a chance.