Jack’s breathing stopped, as though there was a tiny noise somewhere that he wanted to hear. She knew his father? “But I thought …” he started to say, but could not go on. “But …” He looked at Della helplessly, the shoreline receding. Then he said: “Vivian’s pregnant.”
“Oh.” Della nodded slowly. “And she’s worried that her baby will be coloured.”
“No!” It had come out louder than he’d intended. “Of course she isn’t!” Then his voice rose even more. “You don’t know anything about me!”
“Jack,” she said. “I’ve always known. You’re the only one who didn’t. It was one of the things I liked about you.”
“But it’s not true!”
“Keep your voice down,” she said. “Sit here.” She pointed to the second chair.
“Stop treating me like a kid!” he said. But he sat.
“I want to tell you something. A story. When I was your age, when I was eighteen, barely out of high school, Howard and I were engaged, sort of. There was an understanding. My father thought the fucking sun rose and fell on Howard Barnes, and I thought he was the biggest goofball anyone could possibly imagine. It was 1925. Everyone was wearing cloche hats and those skimpy dresses with long beads and elbow-length gloves, and the men slicked their hair back and went to the racetrack and drank Dom Pérignon with breakfast, and here
was Howie with his tennis whites and his savings account. I panicked. I could see exactly what my life was going to be like. He’d have his medical practice and his roses and I’d have children and tea parties and a horse in the country, and we’d vacation in Florida where he’d play golf and I’d wear sundresses and drink too much gin.”
She looked over at him. He tried to figure out where all this was going.
“It must have been the same for Vivian,” she said.
He wasn’t interested in Vivian’s problems at the moment. He would have given his eye teeth for a rose garden and tea parties and a horse in the country. He’d have shovelled shit for the things Della had wanted to escape from.
“So I ran away,” Della went on. “Well, I didn’t run, I got a scholarship and went to Vassar, which wasn’t in New York City but was close enough. It’s a school, darling,” she said when he looked at her blankly. “A very expensive private girls’ school. If I thought I was getting away from tennis and bank accounts … But a bunch of us used to take the train into New York and haunt the cabarets in Harlem and listen to jazz. But you can’t just listen to jazz, can you? Not the kind they played. You had to get up and join in the powwow. We got to be as good at doing the Charleston as the coloured girls, and the men would ask us to dance, and we’d get up and dance with them.”
“You shouldn’t have been there,” Jack said, but he could see the lure of it, the thrill of being in a place where you didn’t belong and were accepted anyway, no questions asked so long
as you were careful. “What happened?”
“Disaster happened. One night I missed the last train to Poughkeepsie. I ran for it, I really did, and I got to Grand Central fifteen seconds too late. I remember standing on the platform watching it go, thinking, Well, girl, that’s it, it’s back to Windsor for you. Vassar girls didn’t miss trains. You could miss a period, but you couldn’t miss a train. I thought about my father, about telling him I’d been expelled and seeing the look on his face. I started to cry. I hadn’t done anything wrong, really, but I knew I was going to be expelled. At the very least I would lose the scholarship, which would amount to the same thing. My life had been ruined over fifteen seconds.”
“What did you do?”
“I stood on the platform watching my life pull away from me, and when I turned around, there was Jonesie.”
“Jonesie?”
“A trumpet player. Hubert Jones. I’d seen him a few times in the cabaret. He was going to Chicago to play for a few nights and then come back to New York, but he missed his train, too. It didn’t seem to bother him much. It hadn’t changed his life, you see, or maybe it had and he was ready for a change. He had some money, so we took a cab back to the club and when the club closed I went back to Jonesie’s place and spent the night with him.”
“You
what
?”
“It seemed simple at the time, as if it was meant to happen. It was like we were following some kind of score. The next morning we both went our respective ways, and that was that.”
“What happened when you got back to the school?”
“Oh, there was the usual weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The dean of women, the scholarship committee, the registrar. But I no longer cared. I had grown up overnight. I’d become an adult—aged, grown old, withered and died, all in one night. If I’d told them I’d spent the night with a coloured man, they would have kicked me out, maybe even out of the country.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “This guy was
coloured
?”
“Of course he was coloured. Anyway, I packed my trunk that afternoon and took a train to Albany and Detroit, considered going to Chicago to be with Jonesie. I even tried calling him at the club where he said he was playing, but he wasn’t there and so in the end I took a taxi home. I told everyone I’d sat in Grand Central all night reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. A few days later I slept with Howard, and when I found out I was pregnant, we got married.”
She sat back as though she had finally come to the point of her story.
“Do you mean you don’t know who Peter’s father is?”
“Jack,” she said, “you of all people should know that you can’t tell a damned thing about a person just by looking at him.”
“You can tell what colour he is! And Peter isn’t coloured.”
“You can’t know that. Do you remember the trumpet player at the Horse Shoe that night Peter played his solo? You were so disgusted when Peter borrowed his horn.”
“That was Jonesie? That’s impossible.”
“Is it, though? Doesn’t it make some kind of sense that after four hundred years of living on the same continent, in the same
cities, in the same neighbourhoods, that no matter who our parents are, we’re all having children that are neither one thing nor the other? Or both one thing and the other?”
“It doesn’t make sense. It’s crazy.”
“It does make sense. And I think you’re a perfect example of it. You spend so much energy trying to be white, trying not to be coloured, you can’t just relax and be who you are. Jack, can’t you see that it doesn’t matter whether your baby is born white or coloured? That it doesn’t matter anymore?”
“Stop it!” he shouted. He raised his hand to strike something, anything. She didn’t move.
He jumped to his feet and rushed down the stairs. It was wrong, everything. Della, and the war and Vivian, and now Della again. He wanted to put his fist through the wall, the sliding door, see it splinter like straw before the might of his fury. He heard movement behind him and looked up to see Della standing at the top of the stairs, and when he turned to the pocket doors, Dr. Barnes was coming out of his clinic. He was wearing a white smock and carrying a clipboard and a silver pen. He looked past Jack and spoke to his wife.
“Del?” he said. “Everything all right?”
“Yes, Howie, everything’s fine. You remember Jack, don’t you? Peter’s friend? He was on your ship.”
Dr. Barnes looked at Jack. “Ah, yes! The young bandsman. Seasickness, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Jack said.
“Well, you seem to have survived it.”
“He was looking for Peter,” Della explained.
“Right,” the doctor said, turning. “Can’t help you there, I’m afraid.”
When Jack looked back up the stairs, Della was gone, and when he turned to the pocket doors again they were closed and the foyer was empty.
VIVIAN
H
er misery and grief subsided, but they left a stain. When Jack came home after his outburst, he seemed to have forgotten everything, but she was wary of him. She didn’t trust his moods. He always said he didn’t mean the things he said when he was angry. Why didn’t that stop him from saying them the next time? He asked about the baby, told her he was sure there would be no trouble with it, which she took to mean he cared only that it was healthy, and when she was alone with him she almost believed that everything would be fine. But when she was with his family, at the hospital or here at the house, she felt despair settle over her. She’d known women back home who had taken steps to rid themselves of babies whose fathers were
gone or unsuitable, and she had never understood before how they could bring themselves to do it, how such monstrousness could be a comforting thought.
First they decided they would stay in Windsor until Jack’s father came out of his coma. Then, when he was moved out of long-term care, or when he began to show signs of improvement, or at least until his condition became clearer. When none of those things happened, they found a furnished apartment on Janette Avenue, the second floor of a house that backed onto a railway yard. It had a living room, a small bedroom, a smaller kitchen and a tiny bathroom, and it filled with grit every time a train passed, raising dust from the cinders on the track beds. But Jack said it was on the right side of town and that they had moved up from the Settlement. The rent was eight dollars a week, and Jack took jobs playing with dance bands two or three nights a week. Alvina, who worked in a women’s clothing shop on lower Windsor Avenue, was helping their mother with groceries, and Jack was paying his father’s hospital bills. Benny wasn’t working, but he didn’t seem to need any help from them. Maybe Dee-Dee was supporting him.
They still visited the hospital most days, or Vivian did while Jack ran errands. He was keeping three households going, he said, theirs, his mother’s and his brother’s. Benny was always there, sometimes with Dee-Dee, sometimes alone, and Jack’s mother and Alvina came as often as they could. The student nurse who looked after Jack’s father was a young coloured woman named Marian Overton. She had gone to high school
with Alvina, and every time she came into the room Alvina said, “Here she is, don’t she look fine?” and Marian would smile shyly and tend to Jack’s father, which, because there was never any improvement, consisted of taking his pulse and temperature, checking his saline solution, then shifting him to prevent him from getting bedsores. Marian was graduating in the spring. “She the first coloured nurse to graduate from this hospital,” Alvina said, speaking proudly but bitterly. “Sixty years this been a teaching hospital, opened especially for coloureds, and in all them sixty years not one coloured nurse, not one, until Marian here. Now, you telling me not one coloured girl in all them years been smart enough to be a nurse? I don’t believe it. I could’ve been a nurse. Dee-Dee here could’ve been a nurse. Lots of us could’ve been nurses. Mama, you could’ve been a nurse.”
Jack’s mother chuckled. “Alvina, dear, I couldn’t have been no nurse. I wasn’t good at shifting your grandmother when I was in service. I was too small. You got to be big and strong to move some of them patients around, ain’t that right, Marian?”
“They’re hard to shift sometimes,” Marian said, “but not Mr. Lewis. I think he helps me turn himself over.”
“There, you see?” Jack’s mother beamed.
“You must’ve been some good at keepin’ house, Ma,” said Alvina, “otherwise Pop wouldn’t have married you.”
Once again, Vivian felt as though a curtain had been lifted between herself and Jack’s family, but she couldn’t say for sure whether she was in the audience or on the stage.
***
A week or two after she and Jack had moved to Janette Avenue, when Vivian was in her fourth month, Jack’s mother invited her for tea. Jack’s mother said she was having Alvina and Dee-Dee and another friend from the Emancipation Day organizing committee over on Sunday, and Vivian was touched that Jack’s mother was making an effort to bring her into the family. The baby would likely be born in time for the picnic, and if it was coloured, she decided, she would take it to Jackson Park to show it the bandstand and the barbecue pits, let it hear the music and listen to the speeches. August would be hot and muggy. She’d need a carriage, and some cheesecloth to keep off the flies. Jack wouldn’t be there, of course, he’d have hightailed it by then and she’d be alone with her child. But she no longer found that prospect as terrifying as she once did.
It was Dee-Dee who opened the door. Vivian knew that Dee-Dee and Benny were living together, and that they weren’t married and didn’t even pretend to be. Such a thing would not have been possible in St. John’s, there would have been a dime-store ring at the very least, and the couple would conspicuously refer to each other as “my wife” and “my husband.” Vivian liked Dee-Dee. She was pert and lively and her eyes sparkled with mischief. It was the first time she’d seen her without a veil or a kerchief on her head, and Vivian noticed a lighter-coloured scar on her forehead, just below the hairline, in the shape of a horseshoe.
Jack’s mother was sitting on the red chair. She jumped to her feet when Vivian entered the room.
“You came!” she said. “I never thought you would.”
“Of course I did,” said Vivian, unsure how to take the welcome.
The other person in the room was a woman of Jack’s mother’s age, wearing a somewhat startling hat made of brightly coloured feathers and ribbons, like an inverted magpie’s nest. The woman herself was birdlike, as tall and slender as a pheasant hen, and she glared at Vivian in so predatory a manner that Vivian was rattled and promptly forgot the woman’s name.
“I call this meeting to order,” said the bird woman when they were all seated in the living room. “All present and we have a guest, Mrs. Jackson Lewis. Miss Dee-Dee is taking the minutes.”
“Dee-Dee knows shorthand,” Alvina said to Vivian. “She works as a secretary down at the salt mines. But she a singer at night,” she added. “They call her the Black Pearl on Hastings Street, don’t they, darlin’?”
“Other places, too,” Dee-Dee said shyly.
“What did they call you when you sang?” Vivian asked Alvina.
Alvina laughed. “They didn’t call me nothin’.”
“Do you know a trumpet player named Peter Barnes?” she asked Dee-Dee.
“Peter? Sure, I know him. He plays at a speakeasy his mother owns down at the bottom of Ouellette, the Flatted Fifth it’s called. I sing there with him sometimes. He’s good.”