The Wedding Read online

  But now Gram really could not see the child. She was made dizzy by the words coming out of Liz, the intimacies, the indignities. Flattened against the wall, she seemed without substance, as thin and crackly as paper, as if she had borrowed time from that baby and must now release it. “It’s not her fault that you married her father. Why did you raise up Lincoln? Why didn’t you let his darkness die with him? Josephine sowed and I reaped.”

  Her head sank forward from the weight of her impotence. Her tears were as dry as the dust her sorrows had stirred. She looked so old, so stricken, that Liz’s spurt of hot anger shied away from its target and thrashed itself out in her stomach.

  “Gram, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. You make me feel sick. No matter how white the rest of us are, we’re just as colored as Laurie. It’s your race that says so. Laurie’s no different from me, just darker. The rest of your life would be so much easier if you’d only stop picking the scab off the sore.”

  Gram’s head began to shake as if it were coming loose from her rigid body. Her voice was full of crying in the wilderness of time outlived. “Don’t hammer at my head until it rolls at that child’s feet. Don’t choose this morning to destroy me. There’s death in the Oval. I woke to the smell of it. That smell never fools me. Maybe, maybe it’s me that’s marked, but it doesn’t have to be. It could as soon be that friend of your mother’s—you know the one—who never comes into this house without complaining about her heart.”

  “Why would you wish the worst to Addie Bannister? She never came into this house without remembering to ask for you. She likes you. You’re the only one whose background she doesn’t pick apart. She’s almost a member of the family: don’t wish a wake on Mother along with Shelby’s wedding.”

  “I wouldn’t put bad mouth on Addie Bannister,” Gram said shrilly. “I don’t believe in bad mouth. All I’m saying is, death is here waiting for somebody. It’s your mother who says it’s Addie Bannister. It’s your mother who says she’s nothing but bones. It’s your mother who says if she tries to come down her heart won’t stand the excitement. And I will tell you this—if death is sparing me for some other hour, some other place, I want to go home to die. That’s all I’m saying. I want to die at home. If you and your child will step aside, I’ll go ask Shelby to take me.”

  But Liz took a protective step forward, partly to shield Gram from the specter of her own senility, partly to save Shelby’s day from a depressing start. Gram would live forever; wasn’t she doing it? “Gram, you don’t want to go back to New York today. Shelby’s getting married tomorrow. Both of you should be here. You wait and go home with Mother. Summer’s almost over. Another two weeks and we’ll all be packing up. Let me take you back to your room and ring for your breakfast. You had a bad dream. That’s all that happened. A nice hot breakfast will help you forget it.” She shifted the baby and took Gram’s arm to turn her in the opposite direction.

  Gram shook her arm free. Like a windup toy that has been wound up too often, she turned herself around with a painfully slow, jerky motion, her cane tapping angrily. With what breath she had she hissed fiercely, “Keep ahold of that child before you drop her and say ‘twas me who made you. I’m going back to Xanadu, and you can’t stop me.”

  Her journey aborted, her toilsome walk having led to nowhere but Liz’s dark baby, Gram used her elbow to steady herself along the wall, so that her hand could hold her heart to keep the hope from running out of it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Shelby awoke to the laughter of Lute’s little girls too, their golden sounds penetrating the edge of her sleep and stirring her consciousness from its dream and into the waiting morning. She flung the covers back, wanting to be free of even this slight encumbrance of sheet and summer blanket. Leaning forward, with her knees drawn up to let the covers slide down them, she was in a cocoon of herself, the scent of her body, the clean smell, the warm smell, striking her nostrils sharply before it dispersed itself amid the breeze-borne scents of the onrushing day.

  Jezebel barked in rapid-fire frustration—her squirrel bark. Some squirrel was no doubt far out of reach in the maple tree outside Shelby’s window, teasing her, probably by flicking its tail. It was a tree that no fat dog could climb for all her foolish clawing at the trunk, but claw she did, as if her industry would bend the bough and pop the succulent squirrel into her mouth like an apple ripe for eating.

  The barking stopped. Shelby knew that Jezebel was sitting on her stern at the front of the tree, her back bolt-straight, her neck stretched tight, her eyes unblinking and alert, her tail swishing back and forth as she tested her patience with the squirrels, not having learned from daily experience that she would give up first, her rheumatism rebelling against the strain on their summer truce, and her common sense advising her that a bone near at hand in a friendly house was more inclined to her persuasion than a treetop squirrel of unknown taste and toughness.

  Shelby had had a puppy once, not a family pet with papers but a puppy of her own of infinite and interesting extraction. She was six when she acquired him, coming upon him deep in the berry-thick woods, where she was never supposed to go alone. But she had awakened one morning before anyone else, unable to wait another day for some forgetful grownup to take her to see if the berries were ripe. She fetched along her sand pail in case they were, and solemnly promised herself to stay within a stone’s throw of the house.

  The pedigreed family dog, looking at Shelby with one half-opened eye and listening with only half an ear, was not bestirred to action by her preparations. He knew what children did with sand pails. They made mud pies. He closed his eyes, folded his ears, and fell asleep, never dreaming that Shelby was going out to get lost, and never to live down the shame of letting her.

  At the edge of the Coleses’ back property Shelby searched around for a stone, rejecting one after another in her search for one that would leave her inexpert hand with more speed than a large one.

  She made a wild throw and marked the spot with her eye, which had no more accuracy than her aim. When she reached the spot, surprised and delighted that she had thrown so far, the bushes just a little beyond seemed to beckon her with their abundance. But even these could not compare with the bigger, bluer berries only one, only two, only three steps ahead, which somehow steadily shrank in size as more and more richly burdened bushes impelled her in every direction.

  When she thought to look back, her house was gone. Its disappearance did not frighten her. A house was too big to get lost. She would find it exactly where she had left it, and nobody would scold her when she showed them the fruits of her disobedience.

  Coming to a halt at last, she carefully selected a berry, licked it for taste, and dropped it into her pail. And as she listened to the round plop of its plumpness, she heard a stirring in the ground cover of leaves, the stubborn oak leaves of last fall, not yet decayed, not yet without sound nor yet turned into timelessness.

  Shelby stared around her and saw two eyes staring back, two wistful brown eyes belonging to a dog with his head between his paws in the ancient attitude of submission. In her astonishment, Shelby let her pail fall from her hand to lie forever with the strange debris of the woods left behind by man in his eternal haste to get somewhere other than where he was. Slowly, and with hands outspread in the way she had been taught, Shelby approached the puppy, believing him hurt and unable to move, making soft little motherly sounds to comfort him.

  Kneeling beside him, she saw he was not hurt but trapped, his lead caught fast in a tangle of briers. Seeing the lead, she surmised that he had jerked away from whatever hand had held it too loosely. He had probably seen or scented a rabbit, and followed its elusive trail to his own disaster.

  Still murmuring gently, Shelby tried to dislodge the lead, but each time she pulled the puppy choked and whimpered, his neck already rubbed sore by his own frantic tugging. She knelt beside him again, her head against his, to reassure him that she was there to help not hurt him, as soon as she figured out how. In a second o
r so she did see how, and unfastened his collar.

  Set free, the puppy rose and almost shook himself apart ridding himself of brush and kinks. Then he leaped on Shelby with grateful kisses. She fell without bruise or scratch and laughed at the suddenness of her descent. The puppy, taking her laughter as a signal to play, romped all over her, and for a while they roughhoused together, forgetful of everything except this outburst of energy.

  When they quieted, both lay panting, snuggled against each other. Presently, they were both sound asleep.

  When they awoke—the turning and twisting of one arousing the other, and hunger immediately besetting them both—the Coles household was already assembling for breakfast, with Liz being sent in search of her sister before Shelby committed the childish act of eating at some other table an Ovalite mother felt obliged to set for her.

  But Liz, too, was long delayed, not by invitation but by children who had already eaten but wanted to stay and play. Nine-year-old Liz, taking at least one turn at whatever game was under way, let precious time pass before she turned to report on her missing sister.

  By now more than a mile away, Shelby and the puppy, the lost and the found (for Shelby was now lost too even if she did not know it), started off in a southerly direction simply because that was the way they were facing.

  “We’re going home to your house,” Shelby said commandingly. “Your family doesn’t know where you are. You ran away and lost them. You’d better show me where they live or they will be mad at you.”

  The puppy bounded ahead and she skipped along behind him, the blind on the heels of the blind, neither with any notion which way either was going, and each believing the other had sense enough to go home.

  Some time later they came out of the woods within sight of the boat-dotted sound. There were waterfront homes in front of them, and people on porches, but the puppy did not even glance in their direction and none of them rushed to claim him. Shelby stopped walking and the puppy did too, looking up at her inquiringly. “I guess we’d better ask somebody if they know you.”

  They turned up a flagstone walk bordered with sweet alyssum. At the foot of the porch, an elderly couple leaned forward in their rockers, the better to study them, in particular this lovely child, this picture-book child of six or seven or so with dark blue eyes and blond curly hair, wearing a yellow berry-stained sunsuit and bright red sandals beneath brier-scratched legs.

  “Hello, little girl,” the elderly woman said.

  “I found a doggy,” said Shelby without ceremony.

  “Did you find him or did he find you?” the woman asked, knowing that children did not always recognize this distinction.

  “I found him in the woods,” said Shelby stoutly. “He was all tangled up in the bushes where I was picking berries.”

  “Well, I don’t think he belongs around here,” the gentleman said with a doubtful look at the puppy, who bore no resemblance to any of the pedigreed breeds found in the waterfront houses.

  “But you live near here, don’t you?” the lady asked Shelby, with another appraising stare that confirmed her first impression that Shelby was of the breed that belonged, and was probably a visiting cousin. Shelby answered that she did not live near, not wanting to confess that she had strayed farther than a stone’s throw, and not knowing that the distance she had come was the infinite distance between two worlds and two concepts of color.

  “Well, you’d better go home, dear, before your family misses you. Stay on the road and don’t go back through the woods. It’s a wonder you didn’t get lost. And you mustn’t fret about the dog—he’ll follow you home and your family will know what to do with him. Run along now, straight home.”

  “I will,” said Shelby, really glad to be given a command, which relieved her anxiety about the puppy and instructed her to go straight home, where, with her hunger and thirst nagging her now without letup, she wished she was this very minute.

  Shelby and the puppy returned to the road and resumed their search for some familiar house or face. Many people saw them pass—most of them smiled, some even spoke a greeting, and all of them absorbed the beauty of the bright-haired child, even taking casual note of the yellow sunsuit and the red shoes. None of them suspected for a moment when they were later questioned that Shelby was the colored child who had now been missing for over four heartbreaking hours.

  A sand pail had been found in the woods and identified as hers, and the unspoken fear was now growing, since no one anywhere had seen her, that she had gone through the woods to the waterfront, stopped to play in the water, waded out too far, and drowned. But the land search went on in the desperate hope that the child would be found alive and unharmed, with no one yet willing to abandon that hope and drag the sea for a small drowned body.

  The sickness of the search was that so many people saw Shelby, but they were not looking for such a child. They were looking for a colored child, which meant they were looking for what they knew to be a colored child—dark skin, dark hair, and Negroid features.

  A snowballing word of mouth, a genuinely sympathetic mouth, had needlessly falsified the child’s description by its thoughtless indulgence in that strange habit of whites of prefacing any and all mention of colored people with the identifying label of race.

  For, as the alarm had spread through the town that a child from the Oval area had been lost, those who knew where the Oval was had added the helpful information that an Oval child was a colored child. Shelby had made the subtle transformation to a little colored girl wearing yellow and red, which made the stereotype complete.

  Even the police and the organized volunteers hampered their own painstaking search by coloring their inquiries. For even they did not believe they were searching for a blond-haired, blue-eyed child, just as the two old people on the porch had nothing in their experience to imagine such a phenomenon. Those who knew colored people only as servants and veered from thinking of them otherwise could not make any association between the poised and lovely child who had brightened their morning and the colored child who had gone and gotten herself lost.

  Even the yellow dress and the red sandals did not strike them as anything more than an unremarkable coincidence. Every little girl had a pair of red shoes. Red was childhood’s favorite color. And yellow was becoming to blondes. In envisioning these unsuitable colors on a colored child, they evoked no image that could possibly compare with their recollection of Shelby. They said they had not seen her, and watched the searchers go off. In a way, they were better off not knowing how unhelpful they had been, and better off not knowing that they had glimpsed in Shelby the overlapping worlds and juxtaposed mores they would not live to see.

  It struck the old gentleman that he should call after the retreating form of the police officer and tell him that a dog was missing, too, but he thought better of it. They had enough on their minds without this bit of frivolous information.

  So they slowly rocked in their chairs, staring at the incoming tide and praying that it held no cruel surprises. For although the interior life of a small colored girl was far beyond their ken, the love of parents for their children was not, and in their own way they hoped this child would emerge from the woods to fulfill her life’s potential, however obscure it seemed to their old, pitying, prejudiced eyes.

  Every passing hour pushed Corinne closer to the moment she most dreaded, the moment when she would have to telephone Clark in the city and tell him—the man who asked nothing more of her than that she take good care of his children—that somehow a child had gotten mislaid while she slept more soundly than a mother had a right to, and that all the police and all the town could not find her. She knew that Clark would clear his office of patients and sit behind the locked door waiting for her next call or for the next island-bound plane, whichever came first. His nurse would be beside him, Rachel, the other half of him, his wife without a ring. She would wait beside him as she was so used to waiting, childless who wanted children, faithful who did not have to be, patient who
schooled herself in patience, knowing she was neither the first woman nor the last to love a married man who could not cut his wife and watch his children bleed.

  Corinne’s trembling hand tried to steady itself enough to reach the telephone. With more miles between herself and Clark than any man-made miracle could bridge, she saw without need of second sight his stunned recoil from the torrent of her terror to the quiet waters of Rachel’s calm reassurance.

  In his agony of spirit, his blood and flesh would turn to her, going deep into the never dry well of her incredible brown body. He would go to her bed, to the flat that he paid for, not to possess her at such a cheap price, but to convince her that this was his home away from home much more than was the summer place where he spent the month of August missing her and taking his only delight in his children.

  Corinne had the telephone in her hand, but her mouth had grown chalky and her tongue felt dry and swollen. The number would not form in her mind, for she had been suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that it would be Rachel who would answer the phone, Rachel who would with brittle formality say that Dr. Coles was out, did Mrs. Coles want to leave a message? She would have to tell Rachel her terrible story, and they, the haters, would have to speak to each other intimately. For they were both bound to the father of that lost child until the day came in some far future when Shelby was old enough to fall in love and free her father to marry the love of his own. But Corinne knew from past experience that Rachel’s first wave of sympathy and concern would quickly abate, and that her next thought would be fueled by her resentment that in her ripe and willing womb no seed had ever been allowed to germinate, in keeping with Clark’s code that no one of his blood would ever have a child they had to hide. She, who would have given Clark the ultimate manifestation of love, was forced to wash her children away, while Corinne—whose womb had been made safe for self-indulgence with the men who were dark enough to excite her—could never replace a lost child for a living one, or bear the son for Clark that lived its useless hour in Rachel’s loins.