The high white sun of afternoon flooded in, and I rolled over on my bed, where I had been reading a copy of
The Tropic of Cancer
I had gotten last winter from a member of the Thieves Club and kept under my bed. The Shirelles wailing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” cut the thick, stale air. I pitched Henry Miller under the bed, turned off the Shirelles (my father was appalled at most of the music of the day), and hid my face against the invading light with my forearm.
My father came over and sat down on the side of my bed. Like me, he was at loose ends in the city in midsummer. He had toiled in the browning garden, watered futilely in the evenings, fixed whatever flapped or rattled, and was close, as my mother said, to giving up and running for his office.
Watching him from beneath my folded arm, it struck me that he walked differently now. The bouncy stride he usually had in the city was gone; so was the loose, long sort of lope he had at Edgewater, going down the dock or across the lawn to the rocks. The precise, padding athlete’s gait that he used in our basement, getting ready to mount the high bars, was gone, too. Now he walked on the balls of his feet, almost on tiptoe, as if ready for flight. If I could have cried within the helmet, I would have, would have wept for my young father who had lost his walk. That I had lost mine also did not occur to me then.
“What are you doing shut up here in the dark, Lillybelle?” he said, brushing the disheveled curls off my forehead. “You look like a mole in a hole. Want to walk over to the drugstore with me and get a milkshake or something? I’ve got to pick up something for your mother. Or even better, when I get back why don’t we go give the high bars and the trapeze a workout? You haven’t even been down there.”
“Oh, Daddy, it’s too hot to go out,” I said fretfully. “I like it up here in the shade. I’m reading.”
“What are you reading?” he said, looking around for the book that was not there.
“Oh,
The Golden Bough
. It’s around here someplace.”
“You know, Lilly,” he said slowly, looking not at me but out the window where the branches of the big dogwood screened out the sun, “sometimes there’s such a thing as too much magic. It’s good when your feet are planted on the earth, but if they’re not you could just—vanish into a cloud of magic and not come out. We’d hate to lose you to a flock of summoning spells.”
I looked at him.
“Why did you say that?”
“I don’t know, it just popped into my head. Come on down to the gym with me, Lil. It’ll be good to be up in the air again, won’t it?”
After a long while, I whispered, “I can’t.”
“Why not, baby?”
“My feet are too heavy,” I muttered, thinking of the plated boots.
I hoped he would not press it; I could not tell him about the diver’s suit. Somehow or other, they would take it away.
He didn’t. He just looked at me for a while longer and said, “Maybe tomorrow we’ll go down to the National Gallery. It’s been a long time since we’ve been downtown. I’ll take you to lunch at the Metropolitan Club.”
“Okay,” I said, forcing a smile. It even felt false. I could imagine what it looked like. He went out of the room, leaving me pointing my silly rictus at the ceiling. I dug
The Tropic of Cancer
back out.
That night at dinner my mother said, “Lilly, we’ve been talking, and we think it might be fun for you to go to camp, or take some lessons in something you like. There’s a lot of summer left, and I’m going to be painting, and your dad’s got his research. I know most of your crowd are off somewhere with their parents, but there’s lots going on in Washington that you might like to try. Art lessons, maybe. Or riding, like Cecie. Or something at the club—their summer program is supposed to be good. Tennis . . .” Her voice trailed off. I could not look at either one of them. My cold salmon looked thick and dead on my plate. I could not get any breath into my lungs.
“Swimming, maybe?” my father said. “There’s a new instructor everybody says is a shoo-in to qualify for the Olympics.”
He paused, looking at me. “You can’t just sit in your room until school starts, Lilly,” he said gently. “You may not think so now, but you can’t afford to waste a summer. Nobody can, not even somebody as young as you. I remember how it felt, thinking that you had all the time in the world left, but that’s not always true. You know that. Don’t throw these summers away, darling.”
It was the closest he had ever come to talking about Jon, and the closest he ever would, for a very long time. I saw tears in his eyes. Incredibly, I felt them on my own cheeks, even inside the hermetic sphere of the helmet.
“Please don’t,” I whispered.
And all of a sudden I wanted water more than anything in the world; clear, cool, infinite water that would close over me and give me weightlessness, water through which radiant shafts of sunlight would dance dreamily, never touching the bottom, water in which I could, as the old
Book of Common Prayer
says, “live, move and have my being.” I could stay on the half-lit bottom forever, floating languidly through the underwater forests and canyons and mountains, as Pierre Arronax had done. All the fantastic and beautiful creatures of the waters of the world could come and bump at my helmet’s huge glass eyes but could not come in. I could live on plankton, on krill, as whales do. I would be a creature of water and light, but not of cold, opaque green water, lightless just inches below its surface. Different water, water that did not steal from you.
“Swimming,” I said. “I’d like to take swimming lessons. I’d really like to do that.”
“Well, you know, darling, you can already swim,” my mother said. “You might be bored in the beginning lessons.”
“No. I wouldn’t. I want to learn to really swim, to swim like—oh, you know champion swimmers do, to be really, really good at it.”
“You couldn’t just want to be that good a swimmer,” my mother said. “You’d really, really have to work at it, probably for a long time. I didn’t think you were that interested.”
“I am now,” I said. “Please, it’s what I want most to do. I promise I’ll work harder at it than I ever have at anything.”
“Well, we’d hope you’d relax enough to enjoy it, too.” My mother smiled. “But of course, if that’s what you want to do, we’ll see about signing you up tomorrow. I just hope it’s not too late to get a class with the new instructor.”
“He’ll take me,” I said. “But could we call right now, instead of tomorrow?”
And so it was that the next Monday, at 10
A.M
., I stood on the apron of the pool at the Chevy Chase Club with perhaps fifteen other girls my age, not caring that my old swimsuit bore the stigmata of another, a northern, sun, while all the other aspirants were sleek as seals in new ruffled one- and two-piece suits, staring up at the bronzed, tanned young man who was going to give me, instead of wings, fins and gills. His name was Charles Rowley, but I never thought of him as anything but Nemo.
“This is an intermediate class, so I assume that you can all swim to some extent or another,” Nemo said. “When I point to you, dive or jump into the pool and swim a length and back.”
He looked at a clipboard and then up at the first girl in line, in candy-striped pink ruffles.
“Melanie Porter,” he said, and pointed at her. Melanie Porter made a little face, giggled, and jumped prettily into the deep end of the pool, feet together, toes pointed. She hardly made a splash, but by the time she had done her Esther Williams face-out-of-the-water crawl two lengths, she was gasping. He gave her a hand out of the pool, and then pointed at the next girl, in a one-piece suit of violet that matched her eyes, cut very low in front and back.
“Margaret Cassidy,” he said, and pointed.
“Everybody calls me Meggie,” she said, smiling widely, and flung herself into the pool in a flat, stomach-blasting dive. She thrashed her way through her two lengths and emerged with a red face and reddened breasts that bobbled now over the top of her suit.
He said nothing, and then looked at me and then at the clipboard. “Lilly Constable,” he said.
I walked to the edge of the pool and felt my muscles respond to the green-blue water below me as if to magnets. I went into it in a clean, perfect racing dive, which I had never in my life been able to do before, and let myself glide deep. This was it, then, the cool, silent world lit from above with gold-filtered sun rays, endless, caressing. My leaden feet felt strong and feather light. The helmet, unneeded, floated away. I felt joyously one with the dolphin, the sailfish, and went the length of the Chevy Chase Club pool and back without going to the surface. Only when I lifted my tangled wet, curly head out of the water did I notice I was gasping for breath. Nemo gave me a long, neutral look and then pointed to the next girl.
“Cissy Stringfellow,” he said.
When the last girl had demonstrated her prowess and we stood in a ragged, dripping line before him, he said, “Well, we have a good bit of work to do, I think. Class meets back here Wednesday morning, same time. Get yourselves a club racing suit before you come. I can’t teach ruffles and bouncing boobs. Lilly Constable, stay, please.”
The other girls filed out, some snickering because they thought I would be reprimanded, some obviously concerned that I might become an early favorite, even in my patched and pilled old suit. I did not notice them. It was about to begin.
“Where did you take lessons?” Nemo asked, studying me.
“I never took any,” I mumbled. I wondered if that would disqualify me for the class. It was, after all, an intermediate class.
“You had to learn that racing dive somewhere,” he said. “And your underwater butterfly is pretty impressive, even if it was grandstanding. If you’re going to be in my class you can’t stay under that long again. I don’t teach drowning.”
“I wasn’t . . .” I began, and then stopped. I couldn’t have explained where the dive and the underwater prowess came from if I tried.
“I used to swim a lot in the summers,” I said, clearing my throat. “It was in Maine.”
“Well, you’ll have to go along with the rest of the class,” he said. “I don’t do special lessons, and underwater swimming is not on the agenda.”
“Okay,” I said, looking at my feet. They were still brown from the high sun of Maine, and scarred from its beach rocks.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t stay after class and swim any way you want to,” he said, grinning. He had very white teeth. “It’s a free pool, so to speak. If I’m still around maybe we can do some underwater stuff sometimes.”
“Okay,” I said again, my heart swelling into my throat with joy.
And so I went underwater, to stay for a summer, and a winter, at the club’s indoor pool and the Georgetown YWCA. Early the next summer, 1963, my parents rented a villa on the beach in St. Thomas, and my father found a snorkeling instructor for me, and Jules Verne’s world came alive for me in the warm, transparent sunlit blue and green water. For two months I was seldom out of it. I remember that summer as a nearly perfect one. I had the glorious water. My father was deep in his research once more. And my mother painted.
The summer before, when Mother was still fiddling around with florals and landscapes and an occasional portrait, Flora, our new young housekeeper (maid, not to put too fine a point on it, my father said), came late to work, and with a bloody handkerchief wrapped around her head. There was blood spotting her immaculately ironed blouse, too, and a huge, ugly bruise blooming on one high cheekbone. Flora was our beloved old Johnnie Mae’s niece, brought onboard and meticulously trained by her aunt, and we loved her. She was sweet-tempered, funny, and so smart that my father began giving her books of poetry to take home and peruse. When she tottered into our kitchen, it was like seeing a despoiled Madonna. My father jumped up and led her to a chair, my mother came with a wet towel and bandages, and I burst into tears. Something whole and sweet in my world had been broken. At the time, I did not know what.
My grim-faced parents took Flora to our doctor on Massachusetts Avenue. She came back with seven stitches, bandaged arms and hands, seemingly stricken to stone. I don’t think she said a word, not that I heard. My father drove her home to Johnnie Mae’s little house in the projects.
My mother’s face was blazing. Her eyes were so dark that they seemed black, and I could hear her breathing across the room, where I cowered at the breakfast table.
“What happened to Flora?” I asked faintly, not wanting to know.
“She was waiting at the bus stop for her bus, and a car full of white men came by very fast and threw Coca-Cola bottles at her,” my mother said between clenched teeth.
“
Why?
”
“Because there was one of her and a car full of them, and because she’s black, and because there was no one to stop them,” she said.
“Isn’t there some kind of law?”
“Yes. There is. And it’s about as useful to black people as socks on a rooster,” my mother said, and wheeled around and went out of the kitchen and upstairs to her studio. She did not come back down until late that afternoon. When she did, she held up the canvas she had been working on. No one said anything. The painting was beyond words.
It was Flora’s face, very close up, the detail amazing. I did not know what you would call the style of painting; it was not so much representational as a sort of tender caricature. There was no doubt that it was pretty Flora, but her caramel skin was mottled and bruised and the stitches were very black and savage against her skin, and where there had been blood my mother had simply let scarlet watercolor dribble. And the eyes—Flora’s eyes—were white-ringed with terror and pain. You could not look away from them. I was silent, still. Flora’s face seemed to burn into my retinas, and I literally felt her fear flood my eyes with tears and thicken my throat. I knew I was looking at a work of amazing skill and emotional import.
My mother had painted this?
Finally my father spoke.
“It is stunning, Elizabeth,” he said, his voice gruff and thick. “I think you have found something inside you that will make you an artist of real importance. I never dreamed . . .”