Wherever There Is Light (11 page)

“I have a message for you.”

“Stop standing there like a dumb cunt. Give me the message and get out.”

“Trudie,” Julian said, and feinted toward the radio, as if he were going to tip it into the tub, an option he'd contemplated and dismissed as an untested experiment.

The Kaiser jerked forward, which made it easy for Julian to lock his hands around his neck and force him into the hot, sudsy water. Julian heard him gurgling over the radio—a piece Julian recognized as one of his father's favorites, Strauss's “
An der schönen blauen Donau
.” It seemed to Julian that the Kaiser was kicking his feet in sync with the Strauss, as if he and Julian were partners in a macabre waltz. Julian pressed harder and when, after several minutes, he let go, the Kaiser's face bobbed up with foam oozing from his nostrils.

When Julian got home, his mother was preparing dinner in the kitchen. For the last year, she had been so distraught over the battles between her son and husband that she had urged Julian to go to America. Julian had hesitated—at first, out of concern for Elana and then because of Trudie. Now, after telling his mother that he wasn't hungry, he said that he was ready to leave. Then he went to his room, having learned two new facts about himself: one, he could kill a man, and two, he could go to sleep without giving it a second thought.

Julian was startled by a car horn honking out on Ocean Drive, and Kendall murmured, “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.” Julian put an arm around her, remembering that stricken, twisted-up boy in Berlin and believing now, as Kendall shifted her head onto his chest, that he could leave that boy behind.

W
alk into the administration building at Lovewood and there it was, centered on a wall, a huge photograph of Garland Wakefield in her high-necked blouse and ankle-length skirt, raising her eyes to the statue of her father.

The picture had been taken by Simon Foxe, who had dated Kendall her sophomore year. He had prevailed upon Garland—who regarded the ambitious young man as an appropriate candidate for a son-in-law—to enlarge the photo and display it as an inspiration to the students. Nevertheless, while a picture may be worth a thousand words, in this instance not one of those words was true. Staring up at her father's pitiless expression, Garland felt more resentment than awe. The seeds of her rancor had been sown when she was a girl and Ezekiel told her that he'd banished her mother—an illiterate slattern, he'd called her—back home to her snuff-dippin', tobacco-pickin' family in Virginia. Nor did Ezekiel have a higher opinion of the governesses he'd hired—and quickly fired—to care for her, teaching Garland that the one person she could rely on was her father.

That reliance had determined her choice of a career and husband and stifled her desire to search for her mother, so that by this Sunday afternoon, as Garland glanced at the statue, she wondered if Ezekiel had escaped one form of slavery only to impose another form of it on her. Lately Garland had been beset by these musings, which she blamed on her battles with Kendall over her refusal to learn the intricacies of managing wealth and operating a college; the girl insisted on spurning the achievements of her grandfather and mother for the puerile scheme of relocating to New York City to become—and this literally made Garland retch—an artist, which Garland considered a hobby for white men who'd been dead at least a century. And that was the good news, for if her daughter's aesthetic pretensions had prompted Garland to up her daily dose of Pepto-Bismol, Kendall's flirtation with Julian infuriated her to the point that at work she often had to fight off the urge to bite anyone within range of her teeth.

Garland reckoned that Kendall's eagerness to join her Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters in Miami had more to do with Julian than it did with her sorority. She intended to give her daughter a talking-to after tidying up her in-basket, and she was resigned to confronting Kendall without a shred of evidence until Professor Rose, in a bowler and three-piece suit, came striding between the banyan trees, doffing his hat at the students who greeted him with exuberant hellos. Garland reasoned that the professor would know the whereabouts of his son.

“Good afternoon, President Wakefield,” Theodor said, taking off his bowler as Garland approached.

“Good afternoon. I see you have your devotees.” Through the grapevine, Garland had heard that Professor Rose had become quite popular. She hadn't observed him in the classroom but knew that it was rare for Lovewood students to encounter a white authority figure who treated them with such Old World courtesy and respect for their intelligence.

“My students are splendid. And I have been meaning to thank you for helping Elana pick up nursing again. It's been a boon to her spirits.”

“Professor Rose!” someone called, and Theodor and Garland spotted Otis hurrying down the library steps.

Otis arrived out of breath. “Ma'am. Professor.”

“How you doing, Otis?” Garland asked. According to Kendall, for a month after Otis came back from Derrick's funeral, he'd been drinking day and night at Hazee's juke. Kendall had stepped in, making sure he completed his assignments and eating with him in the dining hall. That was her daughter, Garland thought. Compassion for everyone—except her mother.

“I'm doing this paper for Professor Rose on Descartes's
Principles of Philosophy
.”

“I remember it well,” Garland said. “ ‘
Cogito ergo sum.
' ”

“That's my question for Professor Rose. That whole thing—I'm not down with it. Sometimes I can think myself into believing I don't exist at all.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Larkin,” Theodor said. “How do you prove your existence?”

Otis recited, “
Ego can . . . Ego canentium piano ergo sum
.”

“Intriguing. ‘I play the piano; therefore, I am.' Plato wrote that music bequeaths a soul to the universe. Perhaps the same holds true for the individual.”

“Professor Rose, I think we listen to music so we can hear our own hearts.”

“Then I look forward to your defending that position in your paper. And Mr. Larkin?”

“Sir?”

“Over my many years, I have taken comfort in the idea that the mind can conquer any event that torments the spirit.”

“I appreciate the advice, sir.”

Theodor and Garland watched Otis go toward the library.

“Professor, I meant to ask: how is your son?”

“His mother tells me he is in Miami Beach on business.”

“Business,” Garland muttered, as Theodor headed into the shade of the banyan trees. “Is that what they call it now?”

Kendall was a resident assistant for the second floor of her dorm. The job paid thirty-five dollars a month and let her live without a roommate in a space she believed had once been a broom closet. She'd hung some of her paintings on the walls—copies of her latest obsession, cityscapes of the Ashcan painters, John Sloan and George Bellows; the revelatory light of Edward Hopper; and her favorite, the psycho-realist Dodd Brigham, who taught at the Art Students League. Their renderings of New York were as powerful and detailed as color photographs even with their wet, buttery brushwork, but they didn't make her room any bigger.

To keep her claustrophobia at bay, Kendall left her door open, which made it impossible for her to pretend she was out when Garland dropped by to enumerate her shortcomings, adding to a list that she was certain her mother had been compiling since becoming pregnant with her. “I'd like to speak with you” was the gambit Garland used after rapping on the doorframe, and this afternoon was no exception.

Kendall swiveled around in her desk chair. “How you feeling, Mama?”

“Not well.” Garland set her briefcase on the floor and sat on the bed, the room so narrow that her knees nearly touched her daughter's. “Why aren't you studying?”

“Just about to.” The real answer was that she'd been too busy imagining herself walking arm in arm with Julian through Greenwich Village and meeting John Sloan and Dodd Brigham.

Garland was silent, gathering herself. Then: “Do I have to explain your history to you? Our family's history.”

“You've done that already. Lots of times.”

Kendall's eyes wandered to her paintings, and Garland wanted to slap her, thinking that at least it would get her daughter's attention.

“Grandpa worked hard, I've worked hard, and your rejecting that to go paint—it's more than I can say grace over. How you going to support yourself? I won't give you a dime.”

“I don't want your money. I've been working since I was fourteen and saved up from every job I ever had. If I'm careful in New York, I have enough for a couple of years. If I need more, I'll find work. I know Grandpa would want me to try.”

“Not if he was your father, he wouldn't. And getting him to change his mind was about as easy as sticking your head up your hind parts and reciting the Gettysburg Address in pig Latin. Nohow would he put up with a daughter of his running off to New York.”

“I'm not running off.”

“Your grandfather used to say that a colored man has to be twice as good to go half as far. And I can tell you it's worse for a colored girl.”

“Does the past have to be my future?”

“You don't change the past by taking up with a white man. Some white men would like nothing better than to take a rich, good-looking colored girl up North and pass her off as white.”

Calmly, Kendall said, “I know I'm not white. And if I forget, they's lots of nearby folks to remind me.”

“That's God's own truth, so I suppose I taught you a thing or two. And here's something else. White people don't have a clue what it is to be a colored. Not one damn clue.”

Kendall was not as calm as she appeared. Her time with Julian
had
been wondrous. When they'd finished making love, Kendall was sore, and Julian had drawn her a bath, sprinkling in bath salts that made the water as redolent as the air after a thunderstorm. As she soaked he changed the blood-spotted sheets, then brought her a terry-cloth robe, which he'd warmed up in a tumble dryer, and when they were done drinking another glass of wine, her soreness was gone, and they got into bed, and he rubbed her with baby oil. Then he was kissing her—everywhere—until she couldn't take it anymore, and this time there was no pain, just their pushing against each other until someone who sounded exactly like Kendall started singing a scat song with the refrain,
Fjul-uck-jul-jul-ian-ian
, and she shuddered as the tension began to leave her in long, slow beats. But the next day, as Kendall ate breakfast with her sorority sisters in the hotel coffee shop, she was distressed by Julian's failure to see the people on Ocean Drive gaping at them with revulsion. And though Kendall ached to be with Julian now, that didn't mean Garland was without wisdom; one reason her mother was so vexing: she frequently knew what she was talking about.

Garland said, “Where do you come to a boy like Julian? I swear you got ahold of the only Jew who drinks.”

“Mama!”

“Don't ‘Mama' me. I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body. But Kendall, our family's made a name for itself, and we did it when white folks thought we should be doing for them. What's his family got?”

“His father's a professor—”

“Without a nickel to his name. The mother grew up in an orphanage and their son ran away to become a moonshiner. Like Jarvis Scales. Not even a high-school diploma. This boy Julian's not good enough for you. He's got nothing but the ability to forget his place.”

“Jesus, God, you're talkin' like one of those Main-Line white ladies Grandpa couldn't stand.”

“You're not hearing me because you're like a man now—a person more interested in what's happening in his drawers than his head.”

They laughed, both of them embarrassed. Save for the facts-of-life talk Garland had given Kendall years ago, it was the frankest conversation about sex she'd had with her daughter.

Garland wagged an index finger at Kendall. “Don't you bring me any of those zebra babies. No black-and-white stripes, you hear?”

“I hear.”

Garland had calculated that by now she'd be furious. Yet her fury had deserted her, leaving her so sad she couldn't bear it. In a searing flash of memory, she recalled Ezekiel sitting in his rocker with Kendall on his lap as he read to her from an illustrated book of fairy tales, and Garland became so enraged at her father and daughter that she had to retreat from the parlor.

“I have to go,” Garland said, then picked up her briefcase and walked out of the room.

O
n a hot May morning, a week before her daughter graduated from Lovewood, Garland stopped her station wagon outside a storage barn, and she and Elana loaded up the car with a shipment from Sears, Roebuck—towels, gauze, bars of soap, boxes of cornstarch, and bottles of calamine lotion. Elana had ordered and paid for the supplies because in March an outbreak of measles had swept through the shacks of the tenant farmers, and Elana wanted to be prepared if it happened again. Last evening, a farmer had informed Garland that some children had rashes.