Wherever There Is Light (12 page)

When Garland learned that Elana had acquired nursing skills at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, she asked her to help care for the farm families. There were only two Negro physicians for all of Broward County, and they drove hundreds of miles of unpaved roads to make house calls and oversaw Provident Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, the one local facility that accepted colored patients. So Elana sewed up gashes and sterilized wounds, dispensed aspirin, and assisted Hazee Thomas, who, when she wasn't at her juke, was a midwife. Owing to a lack of iodine in their diet, the elderly developed goiters, and Elana made sure they ate enough table salt. She preached that cleanliness was not just next to godliness, it could prevent family or neighbors from taking sick; and she sang the praises of Coke syrup for nausea and castor oil for almost anything else: add two tablespoons of it to a cup of warm milk to get rid of tapeworms; heat some in a saucepan and rub it into arthritic joints to alleviate pain, or below the belly of a woman cramped up with her monthly.

Garland said, “We don't pay your husband enough for you to buy supplies. Please send me the bill.”

“They weren't expensive.” Elana had used some of the money that Julian had given her, but she didn't want to tell Garland. From her phone conversations with her son, Elana concluded that Julian was involved with Kendall, and apparently Garland didn't approve, because she had complained to Elana that on a few occasions she hadn't been able to find her daughter on weekends.

On the stream bank down from the shacks, boys and girls spotted with measles were taking turns in the metal washtubs. The water was cloudy from the cornstarch Elana poured in to relieve itching. Mothers were bathing their children, but thirty kids were milling around whining and scratching themselves, and the tubs had to be emptied and refilled after each use, so Elana pitched in. Dabbing the children's rashes with a washcloth flooded her with a joy she hadn't felt since Julian was a child, and as she rubbed a bar of Lux soap on a boy's chest, she remembered bathing her son, and a Yiddish term of endearment slipped out of her mouth.

“Is that good,
bubbeleh
?” she asked.

The boy pouted. “I ain't bubbewho's-it. I be Talbert.”

“I apologize, Talbert.”

Grown-ups had gathered on the bank, all of them watching Elana bathe Talbert and dry him off with one of the new towels. The dark faces watched Elana with a wariness that baffled her, and later, in the station wagon, she asked Garland if she had offended her audience.

“They were in shock. Negro women wash white children. You bathing a colored child is news. White women down here think they're above that.”

“I was a week old when my mother or father left me on the steps of an orphanage in a box. Who in this world do you imagine I feel better than?”

Garland brought a picnic lunch when they visited the farmers, saying that it was the least she could do, but Elana, intimately acquainted with loneliness, recognized a fellow traveler. Today they picnicked on a hilltop from where they could see the ocean beyond the campus with its palms standing like swaybacked sentinels among the brick rectangles of buildings and vibrant plantings of flowers.

Garland said, “When Daddy saw this view, he told me he was going to build the prettiest college anyone's ever seen.”

“And he did.”

“I did. He watched.”

“Did he live to see it?”

“He only passed four years ago. Around the time Kendall started here.” Ezekiel had spent his final month reading the King James Bible. Garland was astounded: save for her wedding, she'd never seen him in a church. Spotting her astonishment, Ezekiel sighed. “I been tryin' to forgive that peckerwood Scales who sold my mother. Can't forgive that man nohow.” Garland said, “Don't trouble yourself about it, Daddy.” Ezekiel lay back on his pillows. “Ain't rightly clear why, but it done took all the willpower God give me not to poison the highfalutin Philadelphia trash that ate my food. If I hadn't had to take care of you, I sure nuff woulda done it.”

Elana said, “Did you always want to run a college?”

“Wasn't raised to want for myself.”

“All the good you've done—for the students and the farm families.”

“The families I do for my mother.”

“You've never mentioned her.”

Garland retreated into a glum silence as they ate slices of ham folded into buttered biscuits and drank sweet tea from Mason jars. Ever since she and Elana had started visiting the tenant farmers, she'd been tempted to tell her about Ezekiel and her mother, certain that an orphan would appreciate her feelings. Yet Garland had never been one to cultivate close friendships. She was mortified by her father's behavior and loath to admit her mortification to a stranger, let alone a refugee Jew who could've passed for a Protestant daughter of the Main Line and who rekindled Garland's envy of those Penn coeds in all their ethereal beauty.

Garland stretched forward and rubbed her left ankle.

“You hurt yourself,” Elana said.

“Twisted it, back by the stream.”

“Here, let me.”

Garland hesitated, then moved her hand.

Elana, scooping some ice cubes from the cooler, folded them into a napkin and pressed it against Garland's ankle.

Garland gazed off toward the college. “My mother was a young girl—poor, illiterate—that Daddy got pregnant, and after I was born, he sent her away. I do for those farm families, it's like I'm making up for what Daddy done.”

Garland turned toward Elana, expecting to see traces of pity or contempt on her face, but all she saw were blue eyes wide with curiosity and compassion. “I told Kendall, but that girl doesn't believe a thing I say. Ask her, she'd swear her granddaddy invented starlight.”

Elana could feel Garland looking at her as if she were expected to tell her a secret in return. Elana didn't mind, but which one should she tell her? That after Theodor completed his yearlong tour of America and they went to Berlin with their new baby, her husband brought less ardor to their bed than he did to their Sunday strolls on Unter den Linden, leaving Elana with a throbbing in her back, a yearning for the rapture that she had once thought was every wife's reward, and a bottomless guilt about her own desires? That she became infatuated with men she didn't know—shopkeepers, trolley-car conductors, policemen, any man who even glanced at her as she passed him on the sidewalk? That in the mornings after Theodor left for the university, she daydreamed about these men and touched herself until the clenching and unclenching of her body wrung the gloominess from her and she was able to face the day? That her loneliness had once become so unendurable she had taken barbiturates with a glass of
Kirschwasser
?

The sexual content of her confession would have embarrassed Elana and, she sensed, Garland as well, so Elana said, “Six years ago, the Nazis burned twenty thousand books because the writers were declared enemies of the Reich. It was in the square by the Opera House and the University of Berlin. The first three volumes of Theodor's work on the Enlightenment were in that bonfire, and we saw the students and the Brownshirts celebrating. Theodor cried until we got home. By that point, Julian had been in the States for several years. Theodor hadn't mentioned his name. Or shed a tear for him. He had tears for his books but none for his child. After that night, I could take care of my husband, but loving him? That was beyond me.”

Garland stared at Elana, her face expressionless. Elana was growing uncomfortable with the silence when Garland surprised her by reaching over to squeeze her hand, hard, and said, in a voice tinged with sadness, “I'm sorry. I'm very sorry.”

S
EPTEMBER
6, 1939

F
ive days after Hitler sent his Wehrmacht to invade Poland, three days after Britain and France declared war on Germany, and one day after the United States announced that it would remain neutral was the happiest day of Julian Rose's life.

On that Wednesday afternoon, with the blare and beat of Manhattan in his ears, Julian stood outside the Greyhound terminal as Kendall, in a royal-blue dress with a ruffled lace collar and her hair knotted in an intricate bun, stepped off a bus and into his arms.

“I can't believe I'm here,” she said.

Julian couldn't believe it either. She'd spent the summer keeping a promise to Garland, helping to reorganize the library, which gave her mother two more months to talk her out of going north. Since her first night with Julian in Miami Beach, Kendall had only seen him three times: a chaste Sunday in Washington, DC, bunched in with seventy thousand people—several hundred of them from Lovewood College—to hear Marian Anderson sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; and two less modest Saturday visits to the Jerusalem Hotel.

As Julian put Kendall's three suitcases in the back seat of the Packard, she went to a newsstand and bought the
Herald Tribune
,
Journal-American
, the
Times
, the
World-Telegram
, and the
Sun
.

“Where do you want to live?” Julian asked, driving toward the Lincoln Tunnel.

Kendall had the
Trib
opened to the rental listings. “Greenwich Village.”

Julian was considering telling her that landlords downtown weren't renowned for their desire to rent to Negroes when Kendall said, “I'm not going to Harlem. It might as well be Lovewood's Coontown. And I'm done riding in the back of the bus.”

“I could help you find a place. In the Village.”

She rested her hand on his leg. “I want to do it alone.”

“Why?”

“I want to know I can take care of myself.”

“That's overrated.”

“Only if you already know it.”

Julian said, “Wanna stop for something to eat?”

“You're not in a hurry to get me to your apartment?”

“Yes, but I was being a gentleman.”

Kendall pressed a hand against his thigh. “That's overrated.”

Julian lived in a two-bedroom on the top floor of his modern, buff-brick apartment building, and Kendall hardly had a chance to notice the pearl-gray wallpaper dappled with miniature claret bouquets in the sunken living room before she was kissing him. In anticipation of Kendall's arrival, he had purchased a bed with a fawn-colored brocaded headboard and azure satin sheets from Bamberger's, the fanciest department store in Newark. The aesthetic appeal of the sheets was undeniable, yet as Kendall and Julian, naked now, enlaced themselves on the satin, they kept slipping away from each other until Julian, turning to retrieve a condom from the night table, slid off the bed, which started them both giggling.

Julian stripped back the sheets, then sat on the cotton mattress pad holding a Trojan and spotted an unfamiliar eagerness in Kendall's eyes as she lay looking up at him. Maybe it was that she no longer had to worry about exams or her mother bird-dogging her, but Kendall seemed completely at ease and surprised Julian by taking the condom from him, rolling it on, pulling him on top of her, and raising her legs to ease his way.