The Wedding Page 4

  In the San Juan Hill section of the city, Hannibal sat behind a big desk, with a roomful of boys subduing themselves to bear him out until the bell rang. He envied them their learning side of the room, and knew that, as much as there was inside his head, there was even more still outside it.

  He went back to college for postgraduate courses, going nights now, working toward another degree, setting his sights on a professorship. And in that slow but adhesive way of his, he began to feel a biological urge, evolving from his step-by-step realization that a man does not work for himself alone or aspire for himself alone. The reward yields only half its worth. A life to be lived must be shared. A man is born sharing his life with his mother. When a man has no mother, he marries.

  And because Hannibal had no mother to share his life or choose his wife, or snatch away the pen he picked up to write with, or feel his head to see if he had fever, or fling herself down before him and tell him he would do what he did over her dead body, Hannibal, acting on impulse for the first time in his life, sat down and wrote a love letter, half of it a letter of reference, stating his age, in case it was forgotten, his state of health, excellent, his occupation, his present salary, his chances of improving that salary, and the other half his solemn avowal of his unworthiness to woo so fair a lady, plus his fervent assertion that the whole of his life depended on her answer.

  Taking that life in his hands, Hannibal addressed his letter to Miss Josephine, not knowing if Miss Caroline would send the whole South in a posse to lynch him, but convinced that he must mail his letter or die.

  Miss Josephine received the letter on her twenty-seventh birthday, when she felt other than she would the day after, when there was no hiding herself from the fact that she was now officially an old maid, who must grasp at any straw so long as it kept the queerness from closing in.

  She stood outside the post office, reading Hannibal’s letter, dazed, white-faced, scarcely comprehending, but clinging, clinging to even this outrageous proposal because there was nothing else to cling to.

  Miss Josephine went back into the post office, took the scratchy pen, wrote one blind line at the bottom of Hannibal’s letter—“I guess so”—bought an envelope, addressed it, mailed it, and felt so faint she had to go home on the arm of a gentleman, who would have snatched his arm away had he known it was not the familiar hunger of their class that caused her giddiness.

  On the way home the one thing she thought, not daring to think beyond it, was that, thank God, it was always she who fetched the mail, a child’s proud prerogative, which she had not forgone, having no child to make her a mother, forced then to continue child to her own mother, and now a cunning child, keeping a secret.

  There was one more letter from Hannibal, brief—for he was now afraid even a breath might blow the whole incredible, miraculous thing away—with money for the trip, and the extravagant promise that he would make her rich.

  Josephine wrote a farewell note and pinned it to her pillow.

  Dear Mama, forgive me. I am going North to marry Hannibal. I do not want to be an old maid, and no one but Hannibal has asked for my hand, no one else has money to feed me. I will never come back to shame you. From now on consider me dead.

  And just as she was, not smartened up for the trip, looking nothing like a runaway bride, only looking as if she was going to keel over, with an empty suitcase purchased en route to the depot, Josephine boarded the train, and did keel over twice before she reached New York from the heat of the bridges burning behind her.

  Gram, with her head held high, her eyes very steady, a smile firmly clamped to her lips, told her friends that Josephine had gone to take treatment from a doctor in New York who was famous for his cures. They knew she was lying—famous doctors were for those who could afford them—but they did not tell her so, which was all Gram asked of them. Let them think what they liked, that Josephine was locked in her room, turned alcoholic, turned mad. Whatever they thought, in their wildest thinking they would never think the worst.

  Gram gave herself a few weeks to live at the longest. She wanted to die, even praying that the stabbing pains in her heart would release her from this insupportable life.

  But as the months added up—months enough to make a baby—Gram was terrified lest she live to this crowning indignity. The pain in her heart increased but did not kill her. She waked on earth, not in heaven, to face a world which God had not made big enough for her and a mongrel grandchild to live in together.

  Her imagination made the imagined child a monster. Though she had seen enough intermixture to know the percentage of two-headed offspring was rare, intermarriage was something else, outside all her experience and, until Josephine, her credibility.

  She knew, without need of prescience, that Josephine would never be so fortunate as to be childless. Having made her bed, she was bound to give birth in it. Unless—and here Gram’s heart almost did stop—unless Josephine sought to destroy her child by destroying herself.

  It was the baby, not Josephine, who almost took both their lives. Josephine, forgetting her advice to Gram to think of her as already dead, wrote piteously:

  Dear Mama, I am dying. I have all I want to eat, and I cannot eat it. Hannibal is good and kind, and I cannot bear the sight of him. The doctor says I am homesick for you. I am six months with child, and I have no strength for it and it is taking what little I have for myself I have made my bed, and now I must die in it. But I cannot die without knowing you forgive me. Please come to me.

  Gram put the letter down and began to cry, great wrenching tears welling up from deep inside her. The area of pain dislodged, and the frozen heart was freed to fill with yearning. The longing to see Josephine, who was her child, and was with child, and dying of it, was stronger than the shame of it.

  Once more, her head again held high, Gram, inviting her coteria of decaying old friends to tea in cracked cups, told another big lie. Josephine’s doctor had referred her to a specialist in Vienna. Whatever the cost, she had to go, and Gram, of course, would go with her. God would just have to perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes. She could not say how long they would be away. If the climate abroad was more suitable to Josephine’s condition, it would be folly not to stay.

  Gram’s friends wished her Godspeed and left her to pack. She wondered wryly if they thought she had murdered Josephine, buried the body, and was now in flight. But they would never report their suspicions to the police. They would never even discuss the case among themselves, knowing it was better to let well enough alone. The truth about Josephine would have knocked them down like ninepins. They, like herself, had too little left in their lives to have their faith in their divinity destroyed by Josephine’s apostasy.

  Within twenty-four hours Gram was on a train going North, she who had never surrendered to the North, uprooted at a time of life when the roots have grown too deep and spread too far for a spade to search them out. The impatient ax must finish the job, and the severing is like blood soaking into the earth. The whole is never whole again, for a whole is the sum of all its parts.

  Gram took her place in Hannibal’s house, sat at his table—with Hannibal standing—took charge of his child, exchanged civilities with his few acquaintances, and moved among the colored strangers, never one of them, but made part of them through Josephine’s refusal to leave the sanctuary of her room.

  Gram, who had hidden Josephine’s dishonor from her own friends, now tried to hide Josephine’s reversion from Hannibal’s. She heard herself explaining to the well-meaning neighbors bringing gifts for the new baby that her daughter—she never referred to her as Josephine, unable to say it without its proper prefix and unwilling to offend by doing so—was making a very slow recovery and was not allowed any visitors. Whether or not they quite believed her was again unimportant as long as they did not know that Josephine, having come at last into full and shocked understanding of her calamity, could not endure the thought of them.

  Gram kept up this lie, not for Josephine
or Hannibal, who must have known no right could come from wrong, but for the infant child, Corinne, whom they had made together, though Josephine would not touch her, and Hannibal was afraid his big hands might crush her, a child with Shelby blood, Gram’s grandchild, however tarred by Hannibal’s colored sperm, but first of all, and above all, a helpless baby, neither black nor white in its need, that someone had to care for, that Gram, having felt its hungry mouth search her flat, dry breast, could not help but pity and, pitying, had to love.

  Hannibal continued to call Gram Miss Caroline. But Gram no longer called him Hannibal, since, in the context of their relationship, it might have sounded like acceptance of him as a son-in-law. She called him Professor, Southern style, thanking God he had chosen teaching as his profession, but still bemused that it had come to pass.

  Hannibal, hearing that courtesy title, was more determined than ever that one fine day Miss Caroline would say it because it was so. Gram became Hannibal’s lodestar. As it had been when he was a boy driving her back in time to Xanadu, the old romantic images of her grandeur returned, recreating the aura in which she moved for him. She supplanted Josephine in his planning. He would not stop with a professorship. He would make his ultimate, unrelenting goal a college presidency. He knew the college he intended to head. A Negro college in Washington that had never had a Negro president, but would have one in him, according him, as was his due, a staff of servants to wait on Gram, as was her due.

  In the meantime he waited on Gram himself. He did the cooking because he was the better cook, and because he was busy in the kitchen he spared her having to break bread with him. He carried Josephine’s trays up to her and made a few polite remarks, which she ignored, with her face turned away. Josephine, who had made herself his equal in bed, from that same bed now acted like his better. And Hannibal, who had Miss Caroline to fulfill his ideal of an aristocrat, was quietly amused, and played out Josephine’s fiction that he was only there to serve.

  Hannibal got his doctorate and his appointment to a professorship at the college in Washington. The child, Corinne, was fair enough to look white, which was the special hallmark of the blue-vein society in which she was to grow up and acquire her prejudices.

  The blue-vein society, so styled because all its members had sizable amounts of blue blood in their veins, injected in some past generation by some passing senator or such, overlooked Hannibal’s unfortunate color because of his professorship, and because he never accepted purely social invitations anyway, and did not darken their functions.

  It went without saying that Josephine could not be persuaded to grace them. With a servant in the house and a bell to summon her, Josephine made imperious use of that bell and the servile attitude and accent it commanded. She rang it almost constantly, and she rang for food. There was nothing else she could think of to ring for, nothing else that gave her such a feeling of blessed forgetfulness.

  Every night she sent for Gram. She wanted to hear about Xanadu, closing her ears to any capsule of current happenings, demanding stories of the great plantation, and listening with shut eyes so that she would drift into dreams divorced from the here and the hell she had made Gram a part of, with Gram not really feeling much like talking about Xanadu after a long, busy day with her granddaughter.

  Hannibal became head of his department, with a bigger house and another servant for Miss Caroline. He ate most of his meals off a tray in his office. At home a tray was brought to his den, where he made a show of pushing his papers aside to make room for it. Gram instructed the servants not to set a place at table for him unless they were told. Hannibal saw to it that they never were.

  Hannibal did become the first Negro president of his college, and was the equal of his predecessors, because of his clock-round devotion to duty. Gram became the grandam of the faculty wives, having that title thrust on her as she had thrust the title of professor on Hannibal, but unlike Hannibal, with no desire to make it meaningful, yet forced, for Corinne’s sake, to accept with grace the unsought flattery, while Josephine, who had started it all, stayed out of it all upstairs.

  Josephine died at forty-five in the fullness of her flesh. Like Melisse, she died of her obesity. They were not even sisters under the skin. They were just two women, worlds apart, who ate as much as they could hold, and died when they could hold no more.

  With Josephine handsomely laid to rest in a Negro cemetery, to Gram—standing whitely by, thinking God knows what heartbreaking thoughts—was left the bitter legacy of living colored, with no one now who was true white with whom she could identify herself, and herself not even able to make a mother’s wish that she had died instead of her daughter, for Corinne, who knew no other mother but Gram, no other loving, no other comforting, would have been more bereft than Gram was if Gram’s hand had been lifeless in her grasp.

  And now Gram was ninety-eight, wanting a hand to cling to herself, wanting Shelby’s hand because it was being joined in marriage with a true white one, and that union, in the time of generations, would return to its origination, the colored blood drained out, degree by degree, until none was left, either known or remembered.

  Gram picked up her cane and started that long, long walk to Shelby’s room, on her way back to living true white, her cane and her trembling old hand along the wall giving what little help they could.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Liz came up the hall stairs, carrying Laurie. Fresh from bottle and bath, the baby was full of infant play, her body bouncing inside her blanket and her hands snatching like petty thieves at anything they could grasp—a button, a strand of hair, a patch of skin. Gurgles of good will spilled out of her busy mouth in little bubbles.

  Liz was on her way to Shelby’s room, where she took Laurie every morning, tucking her into bed with her sister so that the warmth of her baby girl’s body would begin Shelby’s day. If anyone asked, Liz left Laurie with Shelby to give herself an hour or so of time to herself before Corinne awoke and took the house in hand, but it was in fact a calculated act of love on her part, a tender ruse to reinforce the blood tie between her child and her sister, and infect them with the habit of each other. If anything—knock on wood—ever happened to Liz, she wanted Shelby to be Laurie’s second mother. Not so very long ago that was the way it had been with their dolls. When one of them was sick enough to spend the day in bed, which scared her into thinking about dying, the other always solemnly promised to be second mother to the other dolls, to love them as much as she loved her own, to raise them as one family.

  Laurie was certainly more precious per pound than a doll. If Linc remarried, Shelby would have to be Laurie’s second mother, and that husband-hunting hot pants who bedded him could beat her own brats. And if Shelby’s white husband didn’t want a colored man’s child around, he wouldn’t have Shelby around long either. Her colored blood would choose between them. It better.

  Liz left Laurie snuggled deep into the crook of Shelby’s arms and tiptoed away to take the quick shower that would have to stand in for the lazy loll in the tub that her body cried out for. Between the innocent demands of that child and her mother’s anxiety about every nuance of the wedding, she wondered if she’d live to see Labor Day. She did the baby’s wash, wishing she didn’t resent this messy part of being a mother, then sat down briefly for a cigarette and a quick gulp of coffee, the instant kind that instantly kills all desire for another cup.

  It was not the breakfast she would have chosen, but at least the hot drink gave enough of a charge to wheel Laurie around the Oval an hour later, while the family ate their beautiful bacon without a crying baby for company. At home she ignored Laurie’s cries unless they were howls of pain, but here everyone rushed to pick her up and pet her as soon as she let out a peep. Everyone but Gram, who didn’t rush because she couldn’t and wouldn’t even if she could.

  Liz parked the baby carriage by the kitchen door and scooped Laurie up in her arms. It was still early. She crept into the kitchen and up the side stairs. Nearing the top, she heard G
ram tentatively striking the floor with her cane, feeling her way as if testing the hall for traps. Her slippered feet shuffled unsteadily forward with grim purpose. What in God’s name was she doing out here alone at this hour, a woman who couldn’t remember the last time she awoke before eleven? Was she going to be difficult in this last week before the wedding, when months of careful planning hung in the balance?

  “Oh, Gram …” Liz murmured reproachfully. “What are you doing out here? Why didn’t you ring if you wanted something? Just because everyone in this fool house has lost their mind with this wedding, nobody’s going to forget about you. For Mother’s sake, please stay put. Let me take you back to your room. I’ll go wherever you were going and do whatever you want done.”

  “You can’t,” Gram said. “You’ve got that child.”

  “Gram,” Liz said for the hundredth time that summer, “call her Laurie. You screw up your face every time you call her ‘that child.’ If it hurts you to be so mean to a baby, why bother?”

  Gram thumped her cane. “Keep a civil tongue in your head. You’re not so grown that I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve changed your diapers. What you call mean I call blind. My sight’s no younger than the rest of me—old eyes like mine have to screw up to see a dark child.”

  “Gram, you say ‘dark’ as if it were a dirty word. You’re not that blind; you’ve just got a blind spot. Look at Laurie’s skin beside mine. Hers makes mine look washed out. Maybe past generations had color prejudice, but my generation has color appreciation.” Liz held the baby out to Gram, who shrank against the wall for support, for succor, as the tiny hand reached out to her.

  “Touch her, Gram. You’ve never touched her. Something will happen when you do. It happened to me. I was never mad for a baby, I was just mad for Linc. I loathed the whole business of being a mother. I hated the heaviness that kept me from my husband. I hated my howls when Laurie was being born. I hated all that bloody mess for a girl, and having to do it all over again if Linc wanted a boy. Then they held Laurie down to me and I touched her. Just as you once touched my grandmother Josephine, and Mother, and Shelby, and me. That’s when the miracle happens. The first time you feel the flesh of your flesh. Laurie’s the flesh of your flesh to the fourth generation. Touch her, Gram. I promise a miracle.”