He sighed and shook his head, but Aurore knew that he wasn’t refusing to write her story. He had made a different decision, and already it annoyed him. “Five thousand dollars,” he said at last. “And some kind of assurance there’s a point to all this.”
“I’ll have the check for you at our next session.”
He stood. “That will be tomorrow. The sooner we start…”
“The sooner we finish.” She nodded, and stood, too. She wished she had her cane, but she hadn’t wanted him to see her with it at first. She had wanted to appear stronger than she was.
She held out her hand, and he took it again. “Will ten be too late for you?” she asked.
“Ten will be fine.”
“Then I’ll look forward to tomorrow.”
He nodded and said a polite goodbye. Then he was gone.
She counted the lies she had told him already. The biggest had been the last. She was not looking forward to tomorrow.
She was not looking forward to it at all.
P
hillip left the Garden District and turned north, toward Club Valentine, the jazz club that his mother had made famous. It was early, and Nicky was probably rehearsing. He wanted to talk to her, and he didn’t want to wait until the club was crowded.
He parked several blocks from Basin Street and strode past rows of white frame houses. From porches and open windows, the Four Tops warred with the Supremes, and teenage girls in short, bright skirts frugged and watusied on the sidewalks. Someone was boiling crabs in an old sugar kettle in the middle of a driveway. The aroma reminded Phillip that he’d had too little to eat that day.
The club was a two-story building on the corner, with a cast-iron balcony overlooking the tree-lined street, and shuttered doors thrown open to catch the evening breeze. From the sidewalk, Phillip heard Nicky’s voice rising above the street noises.
Inside, he waved to the bartender, who was busy doing in
ventory, and briefly scouted the front rooms for Jake Reynolds, his stepfather. When he didn’t find Jake, he followed Nicky’s singing to the back room. Her dress was red and tight, with a skirt that some people might have said was too short for a woman nearing sixty—although every man in the club would disagree.
He took a seat at the back of the room while she finished the song. Nicky Reynolds—whom the world knew as Nicky Valentine—had a voice that wrapped around the listener like a sable coat. She could wring from each note, each word, the regrets of a lifetime, the heat of tangled limbs on a summer night, the joys of discovering love.
He recognized the song as something of James Brown’s, defining the term soul, which had just replaced rhythm and blues as a category on the charts. When Nicky sang, splinters of her soul rose up in her music. Phillip didn’t know how anyone could see so clearly the problems and paradoxes of the world, but Nicky did. And when she was done singing, the audience always saw them a little better, too.
She spotted him just at the end of the last chorus, and she shook her finger in his direction. When she’d finished, she huddled with the band for a few minutes before she came down to join him.
“What are you doing here?”
He kissed her forehead, and he didn’t have to bend far to do it. She was only a scant head shorter than his six foot two. “I wanted to talk to you. Do you have some time, or should I make an appointment?”
“I’ve always got time for you.”
He looked around. The room was filling with employees preparing for a busy night. “Where can we go?”
“We could probably find a quiet corner in the bar. If you’re hungry, there’s a pot of red beans simmering.”
“Great.”
She led the way. “I don’t think I’m going to like this conversation.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Something about the way you said, ‘great.’”
“Don’t go reading something into nothing.”
She stopped. “Then it’s nothing you want to talk about?”
“I didn’t say that.” He slung his arm around her shoulder and kissed her hair. “Listen to you giving me trouble already.”
In the bar, he settled in a corner while Nicky went for food. She returned with bowls of red beans and rice, and half a loaf of French bread. The bartender brought them a pitcher of beer.
He waited until the first pangs of hunger disappeared before he told her his reason for coming. “I got a strange phone call today.”
She ate on, clearly waiting for him to continue.
“Well?” he asked, when it was clear she wasn’t going to comment. “You’re not curious about it?”
Nicky tore off another piece of bread. “I never said I wasn’t curious. I just know what kind of phone calls you get. Threats. Bribes. If you don’t tell me about them, I can pretend you have a job that doesn’t put you on the front lines every week or so.”
Phillip switched easily to the French that had been his first language. He always did, when the emotional content of their conversations warmed. “Not every week or so,” he said, with the accent of a native Parisian.
“Often enough to turn my hair gray.”
“This wasn’t a threat or a bribe. It was an offer. A job offer.”
“So you’ll be leaving again. Just don’t tell me you’re going to Vietnam.” She didn’t look up. Like any good New Orleanian, she used her bread to sop up the spicy remnants of the red beans.
“It’s a job right here,” he said in English. Phillip leaned forward and touched his mother’s hand. His skin was shades darker than hers, but still lighter than that of the father he had never known. Once, in a newspaper article about Nicky’s career, he had been described as toffee-colored and his mother as café au lait, and he had wondered why the skin of people of African descent was always compared to something to eat or drink. Since then, he’d toyed with the idea of describing whites as tapioca-hued or the color of applesauce, but discarded the notion as suicidal.
“I’ve been asked to write a biography,” he said.
“Whose?”
“A woman named Aurore Gerritsen. Heard that name before?”
He had succeeded in making Nicky look at him. She narrowed her eyes and pondered the thirty-seven-year-old man who had once been a baby at her breast. “You’re planning to waltz on over to White Folks’ Acres and ply the richest woman in town with questions about her life? Who asked you to do this, anyway?”
“She did.”
Nicky was too good at keeping her own secrets to let her surprise show. Her face was remarkably unlined for a woman her age. It didn’t wrinkle now, nor did her hazel eyes narrow further. “I don’t believe it.”
“She called me herself, and I saw her right before I came here.”
“Why’d she want to see you?”
“I thought maybe you could give me some insight.”
Nicky leaned back in her chair, taking her hand with her.
“I don’t know the woman. And I’ve never heard her name mentioned in connection with any civil rights activities.”
“I’ll bet you know who her sons are, though,” he said. “Or were.”
“There’s not a person of color in this city who doesn’t know about them.”
On the trip to Club Valentine, Phillip had considered and rejected half a dozen theories as to why Aurore Gerritsen had made her strange offer. She was an elegant old woman, white-haired and even-featured, with an expression in her pale blue eyes that was as warm and guileless as an old friend’s. But he didn’t believe a single thing she had told him. Not one word.
He had searched his mind for possible connections to the Gerritsen family, but he knew nothing about them that the rest of the city didn’t know. Aurore Gerritsen had given birth to two sons. Her second, Ferris, was a state senator, well-known for his staunch segregationist views. The oldest son, Hugh, an activist Catholic priest, had been killed one year ago at a civil rights meeting in a parish south of New Orleans. The flamboyant ideological differences between the two brothers had made sensational newspaper copy after Father Gerritsen’s murder.
“I just wondered if you knew something that I didn’t,” he said. “Do you think this is her way of siding with the dead son against the living? A rebellion? I write up her life story, and she hands it over to the senator with my name on the manuscript, in order to make some sort of statement?”
There were no answers in her eyes. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s odd. Odd enough to make me want to know the truth.”
“Are you looking for an excuse to stay in the city, Phillip Gerard? Is that what this is about?”
Phillip sat forward. “Go on. Come right out and say it.”
She made an exaggerated face. “I think it’s getting harder and harder for you to pack your bags. I think a certain kindergarten teacher snagged my baby boy but good, and every time he puts up a fight, she reels him in a little bit closer.”
He laughed, in spite of himself. “Don’t go getting your hopes up. Belinda’s more independent than I am.”
“You’re saying that’s possible?”
Phillip leaned over to kiss his mother’s cheek. “Will you give this Gerritsen thing some thought? Let me know if something occurs to you?”
“Go write something and make me proud.”
“You’re already proud.”
“Prouder, then.”
He flashed the smile that had gotten him through doors few men of color had been allowed to open. Accepting, patient, the smile promised no demands. Most people fell under its spell before they noticed that the eyes above it were sharp with an awareness of life’s ironies.
Nicky was sinfully proud of her son, but she had stopped telling him so the day she realized he was proud of himself—a feat not easy for a black man of the sixties to master. She stood at the front door and watched his retreat. At the end of the block, he turned and waved before he disappeared around the corner.
Flanking the street were huge magnolias spreading, leaf to leaf, like a string of botanical paper dolls. Every week Jake threatened to cut down the ones in front of Club Valentine, and every week Nicky threatened to leave him if he did. The magnolias partially blocked the street, and Jake wanted to
know who was driving by and at exactly what speed. Nicky didn’t even want to know that a street was there.
The sound of a car filtered through the trees; then the sound of another took its place. She knew that Jake had arrived, because the rattling engine of his Thunderbird needed a tune-up, and would continue needing one until it died in traffic and had to be towed.
He came up the sidewalk with his head bent to examine the flower beds lining the front. His expression was one she had seen on his father’s face as he walked through his north Louisiana fields, worrying whether there would be too much rain, or not enough to grow his cotton and the vegetable garden that kept his large family fed.
“Hear it’s supposed to shower tonight,” she assured him.
Jake looked up. His smile always started in his eyes and worked its way slowly down to his lips. It was the first thing she had noticed about him. Everything else had seemed immaterial. “I’ll set you to sprinkling if it doesn’t,” he said.
“That’ll be the day.” She waited until he was almost to the door before she walked toward him. Even now, after twenty years of marriage, she liked anticipating Jake’s kiss.
He was tall and broad-shouldered, still straight and strong, despite a back that sometimes sent him to bed for a day. His hair was graying, but thick enough to stand out around his face like a warrior’s helmet. She stood in his embrace and listened to the sound of thunder in the distance.
“Phillip tells me he might be staying around for a while,” he said.
Nicky wondered how Phillip had managed to transfer that bit of knowledge already. “Did he? Did he tell you why?”
“Didn’t get the chance. Car came up behind me, and I had to move on.”
She moved away so that she could see his face. “Aurore Gerritsen asked him to write her biography.”
“Gulf Coast Shipping Gerritsen?”
“That’s the one.”
“And he’s going to do it?”
“He’s going to start tomorrow.”
Jake pulled her close again, and she only resisted for a moment. “I thought you’d be jumping for joy, Phillip staying around awhile longer.”
“They’re not our kind of people, Jake.”
“Well, that’s for sure. Last time I looked, they were whiter than white.”
She pulled away, but she kept her hand in his. “Ferris Gerritsen’s the worst kind of racist.”
“And what kind’s that?”
“The kind that pretends it’s not.”
He squeezed her hand. “Phillip can take care of himself. And in the meantime, he’ll be staying around. It’s time he put down some roots, and there’s no better place for him to do it.”
She saw him glance toward the bar. He would check the inventory a second time. He always did. “We’re going to have a full house tonight. Place is booked solid,” she said.
“Booked solid every night.”
She had thought they were done, but she found herself holding him there. “I want Phillip to stay, Jake. You know I do. I want him to have some roots. That’s something I’ve never given him, never known how to. I just don’t want him to make compromises. I don’t want him fetching and carrying
for some old woman who’s trying to show the world what a liberal she is. What’s he going to get from that?”
“A story?”
She was silent for a moment, then she shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maybe that’s why he’s considering it.”
“Or maybe he’s considering it because he’s fallen in love and he needs an excuse to stay in town awhile.”
Music flowed through the bar from the back room, slow, smoky jazz from another decade. She recognized “It’s Too Soon to Know,” one of Jake’s favorites. She smiled. “Sometimes I think you believe all those foolish old songs I sing.”
He dropped her hand, but only to cup her chin. “Sometimes I do.”
Belinda was sitting on her side of the front porch when Phillip pulled into her driveway. Two neighborhood kids were sitting on the rail in front of her, leaning against a thick tapestry of jasmine vines that scrabbled to the roof. The older of the little girls was braiding the younger’s hair.
“You’re never going to need kids of your own,” he said as he climbed the steps. “You’ve always got plenty of somebody else’s.”
“Best way to do it. That way I don’t have to worry about taking care of some man, too.”
Phillip wasn’t sentimental. What sentiment had survived his childhood had been bled out of him, one drop at a time, in places like Birmingham and Montgomery. But something, some loose wire inside him, reconnected at the sight of Belinda.
She was wearing dark print harem pants and a fringed top that stopped short of her navel. Just weeks before, she had cut her hair nearly as short as a man’s, and the effect was stunning.
She had a long, regal neck, and an oval face accented by curly-lashed almond-shaped eyes. The radically short haircut brought the whole woman into view, the beauty, the pride.
The temper.
“You left coffee cups all over my desk, Phillip Benedict.”
“I plead guilty.” He leaned against the porch post. “What do you think I should do about it?”
“I think you ought to get yourself inside and clean up, that’s what I think.”