The Wedding (7 page)

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.

It was true that in the nighttime of love Corinne desired and was possessed by the very darkness that repelled her in the day. Her repulsion was grounded in a suspicion that, given her forebears, only chance had given her the proper, fair color. Chance had smiled again and given her two daughters in her likeness, but Hannibal’s half of her makeup still had to be heard from, and the chance of that pattern continuing unbroken was too slight for her to risk a third try at bearing Clark a son. Her fear that she might reject her child as Josephine had rejected her was too deeply rooted in her psyche for her to drag it up to the surface and damn the consequences.

Suddenly her face went slack around her open mouth and she collapsed, the floor rising up crazily to slam her in the face. The local doctor came and she was put to bed under mild sedation. She slept fitfully, softly whimpering.

Gram, already past eighty at this point, took up the watch. She sat quietly on the enclosed porch, erect in a hard-backed chair. A pane of glass shut her out from any strength-draining conversations with the neighbors who silently stood vigil on the lawn, quieting the children when their voices shrilled, allowing Gram the dignity of her isolation.

In a summer settlement some distance from the Oval but very like it in its quiet location and little park, the mothers
gossiping back and forth about the lost child and the waning hope of finding her alive felt great sympathy for the Negro mother. They wished that there were some way they could help, for they knew that it could have been one of their own children as well as not, and they thanked God for sparing them. From time to time they made a careful check of these children, screeching a little one’s name whenever a panicky eye overlooked the object of its search. It was some time before anyone noticed that the protective circle of neighborhood children included one more child than it should, and one more dog. For a while the child was left to itself, each mother thinking rather smugly that
her
small child was where she could see it. This was no day to let children run free.

Shelby had been drawn to this sanctuary because it resembled home, with its little park and its children playing and its mothers watching them. She found a tree to stand under and leaned against it, thoroughly tired after the long walk through the heart of town. For the first time that day it occurred to her to be worried about her situation. The puppy was nervous too, as if he sensed her anxiety. He darted from beneath her feet and into the street and back again, over and over, several times narrowly avoiding a grisly fate beneath onrushing wheels. The summer cars honked at the puppy impatiently, until finally a policeman, terribly conscious that his summer job existed because of them, told Shelby a little too tartly that her dog was tying up traffic.
“Go
home and
tell
your mother that all dogs must be restrained on a leash downtown. Or their owners will be fined.”

Shelby could only stare back. She was too overcome at
being the sudden center of attention, a dozen honking cars screeching to a standstill, and a tall policeman, as tall as the sky, crying sharp words that she couldn’t unscramble. On top of it all, the puppy—not knowing a friend from an enemy—insisted on digging his paws into the policeman’s impeccably creased pants as he begged for water, using the only sign language he knew.

Shelby, older and shyer than the dog, kept her own extreme exigency to herself, though it was rapidly reaching an excruciating state. Bracing herself against the tree, she clamped her legs together and began to shiver uncontrollably. She tried desperately to find a dark face among the crowd of mothers. She simply knew that a dark face was almost always an approachable face, while a white face was always a passerby’s face, one of so many that it was impossible to pick out the right one. Her straits were too intimate to reveal to a stranger.