Grace (13 page)

Justin’s point was not the need for the handicap, which seemed to him to imply some intrinsic deficiency in his students, but, rather, his faith in his students’ intellect. “Just give them a push and they’ll fly,” he said. “They already have the wings.”

Now Banks is slapping him on his back. “What are those ideas you’re putting in Mark’s head?” he says.

“We read
Beloved”
Justin says. He does not add, “Along with
Medea.”
He knows his limits with Lloyd.

“So what’s that about Mark saying that if we men don’t watch out and start treating our women better, they will kill our children? I thought Sethe killed that baby because the slave catchers were coming to take her children back to slavery.”

Justin knows that Lloyd has not read the novel, but he has seen the movie.

“Yes,” says Mark, trailing behind them. “I don’t disagree, but that is not the only reason she kills her child.”

Lloyd Banks stops. “So teach the teacher,” he says.

Mark smiles and looks at Justin. “You remember, Professor, when Paul D tells Sethe that her husband did not leave her? Remember what she answered?”

“Tell Professor Banks,” Justin says.

“She says, ‘What’d he leave then if not me?’”

“She said that?” Banks looks surprised.

“More,” says Mark. “She said that if Halle is alive, she will never let him set foot in her house. Sethe had it in for Halle. She was thinking of him when she swung that ax.”

For a moment Lloyd Banks’s face darkens. His eyebrows converge and his mustache droops over his mouth. Then the mood passes. He slaps Mark on the back. “Woman troubles, Mark?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.” Mark grins.

Student and teachers part where the corridor divides into two pathways, one leading to faculty offices, the other to classrooms.

“Teaching subversive literature, uh, Justin?” “You’re rubbing off on me,” he answers. But when he is in his office and the door is closed and the room is quiet, his thoughts return to Sally and her tears last night. She cannot handle grays, she told him. She wants only black and white, yes or no choices, nothing in between.

“Love is or it ain’t,” Sethe says to Paul D when he is confounded by her terrible choice. One or the other, no compromise. What black-and-white choices, he wonders, is Sally capable of making?

When the Ku Klux Klan murdered Sally’s father, her mother, Ursula Henry, shut down. It was a black-or-white choice for her: either to pick up the pieces and continue as before, or to shut down, seal her heart, and swear never, ever in this life or even in the next, to love a man the way she loved her husband. She chose to shut down. There was no halfway solution for her, no compromise.

She refused to leave Alabama.
Could not
, she said, and convinced them all when two days later she began stuffing her mouth with the bloody dirt in the front yard where her husband had fallen, his body riddled with bullet holes, three that had pierced his heart.

She was hospitalized, a mental hospital for the temporarily insane. A sister who lived in Birmingham took in the children and waited for their mother to be discharged, but it was soon
clear that Ursula would remain in the hospital long past the summer. So Dr. Henry’s sister brought his children home, to Harlem. She sold their brownstone house on Strivers Row to pay Ursula’s bills. It was not enough. Her brother had a soft heart. There were two mortgages on the house and few records of the money his patients owed him. The little life insurance he had ran out by the time Sally was ready for high school, and so it was a blessing (though no one discounted the long hours Sally spent studying in her room) when the results of the entrance exam for Hunter College High School came out and Sally had scored in the ninety-eighth percentile. Her future was assured. Tony was not so fortunate. By the time he was fourteen, he was sticking needles in his arm.

Sally told Justin that her mother’s life ended in that front yard in Alabama. When she eventually came home to her sister in Alabama, her mother slept on the left side of the bed and on that side only. It was the side she had lain a lifetime, next to her husband: eight years. She was twenty-nine when he died.

It is this black-and-white choice that Ursula made that now frightens Justin. He decides that when he gets home tonight he will have the long talk with Sally he has been avoiding. He will ask her to tell him what she discusses with her therapist because, one, he does not want her to leave him, and two—mostly it is this second question that makes sleep difficult for him sometimes—he wants to know if the reason Sally cannot see gray is the return of an old heartache, a memory of a muse, the one for whom she wrote those wild and passionate poems.

He had met Ursula Henry only once. It was before he and Sally were married. Ursula was dying of cancer in the psychiatric hospital where she had committed herself when her son OD’d. Sally had asked him if he would drive with her to Alabama. It had been two years since she had seen her mother.

Sally did not tell him that the hospital where her mother was a patient was a psychiatric hospital, but on the way there, she told him everything else: about her father, about her aunt, about her brother, about her mother’s helplessness. Bouts of depression, she called it. The story did not make Justin nervous. It did not cause him to reconsider his proposal of marriage (as if anything could). It did not bother him that her mother’s illness could be passed on to their children. The depression had a cause, as Sally’s depression had, though it was difficult for him to define it, and her father was a brilliant man, a doctor, a graduate of an Ivy League medical school.

It shocked Justin to see how thin Sally’s mother was—all skin and bones—but it shocked him more to see how much Sally resembled her. The eyes were the same, large and round, though Ursula’s consumed her, and the dark circles under them were not unlike Sally’s, though they were much darker. Purpled. Except for the folds that gathered around her mouth and neck, her skin was stretched taut across her wide cheekbones, paper-thin and dry, yet flawless, the color of burnished copper. Like Sally’s.

“So you are Sally’s intended,” she said the moment she saw him. “Come,” she waved him closer toward her. “Did Sally tell you I am crazy? This is a crazy hospital?”

That was when Justin knew for certain where he was.

“I committed myself,” she said. “Did Sally tell you?”

Sally began to cry immediately.

“Ah, I can see she did not tell you.” She shut her eyes.

Sally leaned over and kissed her. Ursula put a wiry thin arm around Sally’s neck and held her. When she released her, she was crying too.

“But I am not crazy,” she said to Justin, wiping her eyes. “Just dying.”

Sally rubbed her hand. “Mom,” she said, “Mom.” The word seemed wrenched from the bottom of her heart.

“Why haven’t you come before, Sally?”

“Mom, I wanted to come. It’s far, you know. New York is far from Alabama.”

“She was afraid.” Her mother said this to no one, her eyes traveling far into the distance.

“Mom, Mom.” Sally put her hand on her mother’s chin and turned her face toward her. “Remember what I wrote to you about Justin?”

“Justin?” Ursula looked at him as if for the first time.

“We are going to get married,” Sally said.

“Justin?” She repeated his name. “You’re not the one that made my Sally crazy?”

“This is Justin,” Sally said. “I wrote you, remember?”

“Sally went crazy, you know. Over a man who killed her brother.”

“Mom, don’t say that.” Sally leaned against Justin.

“Is that why you don’t visit me like you used to?” Ursula
pulled herself up in the bed. “Before Sally went crazy, she used to come every day.”

“Every month, Mom.”

“You’re not the one who made my Sally crazy?”

“I’m Justin,” Justin said.

“Ahh.” She closed her eyes and leaned back on the bed.

“He’s a college professor,” Sally said.

“Schoolteacher,” her mother said.

“He has a Ph.D. from Harvard,” Sally said.

“Schoolteacher,” her mother said again. “It’s good my Sally is marrying a schoolteacher. You’ll keep her calm. You won’t get her excited. Schoolteachers don’t let their children get excited.”

“Justin went to Harvard,” Sally said.

“My husband,” Ursula said, “went to Yale. The medical school. One of the first black men.”

“Sally told me,” Justin said. “You must have been proud of him.”

“Until he got himself shot,” she said. “The Klan did it, you know.”

“Mom,” Sally squeezed her hand, “are they treating you well here?”

“He was too excitable, too impulsive.” She was still talking about her husband. “He got us nervous, too. Sally, me, and Tony. We got too nervous when he got so excited. Those men.”

“Do they feed you enough?” Sally asked.

“He should not have gone out there. I told him so. I told him so, Sally.”

“Yes, Mom. I know you did.”

She sighed. “But you won’t get my Sally nervous, will you, young man? You’ll be good to her, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Justin said. “I love her.”

She looked at Sally. “Love is not always a good thing,” she said. “Love was not always good to Sally and me.”

“My love will be good to Sally,” Justin said. “I promise you.” And he meant every word he said.

“She took such good care of her brother. I wasn’t there, but she took such good care of him. What happened to your brother, Sally?”

“You know, Mom. You know Tony died.”

“Sally was so good to him. You take care of Sally the way she took care of Tony. Will you do that for me, young man?”

Justin promised.

“I can die now that Sally has a good man,” she said.

Sally began to cry again.

“Everyone has to die, Sally. I’ll be with your father and Tony.”

Justin put his arm around Sally.

“There is no accounting for love, no accounting for how it happens and when it ends. When my love ended, there was no one else. I’m glad God gave Sally someone else. Schoolteacher? That is what Sally needs: someone strong, someone steady, someone to make her happy.” She left them again, her eyes taking her to a place they could not see. When they refocused, she crooked her finger and beckoned Sally to come nearer. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “Come, come closer.”

Sally bent toward her.

“You, too, Justin.”

Justin bent toward her, too.

“I prayed for grace,” she said. “If God had given me His grace, I would not have suffered so.”

“Oh, Mom,” Sally said, “God loves you.”

“I know. I know. But God does not give His grace to everyone He loves. He did not give it to me. It is a gift, Sally, and it is His to give to whomever He wants. You can’t earn it; you can’t make Him give it to you. But God gave it to you, Sally. After that man, after your trial with that bad man, He gave you Justin.” She smiled weakly at Justin. “It’s God’s sprinkling of stardust on you, on both of you. His grace. Don’t throw His gift back in His face. And, you, Justin,” she said and held his eyes. “God will make you responsible for my Sally’s happiness.”

Ursula Henry died the next day. Justin helped Sally bury her, and they married four months later, in the same tiny church in Alabama, where the minister said it was good her end had come at last. No one should have suffered as much as she had suffered.

It is the promise he made to Ursula Henry that Justin remembers now as he turns the key in the lock on his front door.

THEY DO NOT hear when he enters the parlor, or if they do, they are so preoccupied with what they are doing that they do not call out. Justin is in the kitchen before he sees that Anna is there too. They make a perfect circle: Anna, Sally, and Giselle. They are leaning over the kitchen table. Anna and Sally are
standing, Giselle is kneeling on a chair. Her hair brushes against Anna’s.

“What is it?” Justin walks over to them.

Sally breaks away first. “Justin. We weren’t expecting you. You’re early.”

Giselle joins him and jumps into his arms.

“Anna,” he says. He hugs his daughter. “What brings you here?” Her presence is like a prickly nettle that chafes his skin. He does not want her here. He resents her intrusion. He wants to be with his family alone.

“She is showing Mommy and me how to grow seeds,” Giselle says. She squirms out of his arms and goes over to Anna.

Justin moves closer to the table. Anna is picking up a thick layer of damp paper towels. There are tiny seeds on them.

“How long will they take to make roots?” Giselle asks.

Anna moves the paper towels with the seeds to the window. “I’ll put them here, on the shelf, so they can get the sunlight.”

“How long, Aunt Anna?”

“A couple of days. I’ll be back.”

“Didn’t you have classes today, Anna?” Justin stands close to her.

“It’s my day off,” she says.

“You mean your research day?” he asks.

“Yes. My research day.”

“Don’t you have to do research on your research day, Anna?”

“Do you do research on your research day, Justin?”

“Always.”

“Goody for you,” Anna says.