Grace (24 page)

“No, I just got it.”

“Do you mind if I read it first?”

“No. No, not at all.”

“It’s about a black man passing. I think the author wants us to feel sorry for him, but I don’t see why. Not for the way he hurt his family. To me, he took the easy way out of his problems. But I guess this book was not written for us. I suppose the writer wanted white people to feel sorry for all that black people have to go through, even the ones that pass.” She opens the book but before going back to it, she says, “What I would truly like to read is a book where the writer is not feeling sorry for us, but is admiring us for something we have done. This writer
does that, but he says it at the end of the book and that is too late for me. It sounds gratuitous.”

He has said something like this to Banks. He has said that the emphasis on victimization has obscured all they have achieved, all that could have been achieved if the Europeans had come to trade instead of to enslave. And suddenly he remembers a woman with flowing dreadlocks. Banks had introduced him to her not long after they chanced to meet one evening as he was leaving a restaurant with Helen Clumly on his arm. The woman Banks wanted him to date instead of Helen Clumly was a collector of African art. He remembers her standing in reverent silence in front of a carving of an African warrior.

“It dates back to a time when Europeans were still making scratches in caves,” she told him. Then she gave him a lesson in art history.

Their relationship did not last. Why? he wonders now. Was it because he did not like to be challenged by a woman who knew more than he did? Helen Clumly had given him her reason for ending their relationship, but was this
his
reason for breaking up with her? Was she too smart for him? He complained that Sally had turned to reading psychobabble, but he did not encourage her to read other books; he taunted her. When he saw her sliding, he did not help her.

Sally does not wait for his response. She murmurs that she is almost at the end of the book and settles back into the armchair.

It is clear she does not want to be disturbed. But later, before he falls asleep, Justin takes encouragement from this small thing: She is reading a book he plans to read. There is hope. It
will not be long, he thinks, before they return to those days, only eight months ago, when they read and talked late into the night, sometimes until dawn.

THE NEXT NIGHT, as she prepares for bed, Sally says to him that she has heard of an ashram upstate. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to go there for the weekend.

“When do you have to present that paper in Atlanta?” she asks him.

He lies. “In three weeks,” he says.

“Then I can go next weekend.”

She picks the weekend of the conference. He does not mind. He is not anxious to go. He does not want to be a problem.

“Anna says I will like it. She’s been there.”

She is sitting on the bed, taking off her slippers. He closes the book he is reading and turns off the light on his side. He has not left their bed since that night he dreamed of his father. He walked toward Sally. She whispered his name. He kissed her. And every night afterward he has slept here, with her, but they have not made love.

“I wouldn’t have thought ashrams were Anna’s style,” he says.

“Anna says she loves the silence. She goes there to communicate with nature. She takes Wordsworth with her.”

Not until now, not until Sally mentions Wordsworth, does it occur to Justin that there could be a connection between Anna’s interest in horticulture and the classes she teaches. Could he have been so wrong about her? Twice? When she told him she took her classes on trips to the Botanic Garden, he scoffed silently at
her self-indulgence, her lack of conscience. He thought then that not only had she done no research since she got tenure, not only had she switched her interests so completely away from her academic discipline, but she was willing to compromise her students, to cheat them of the literature they should be learning.

“She says she gets closer to Wordsworth’s poetry when she is there,” Sally says. She lifts the covers and gets into the bed. “She says she understands the poems better.”

Make the work accessible and the students will own it.
It was his defense to the Great Books committee.
Let the students discover the relevance.
Justin berates himself for his arrogance.

“Anna thinks the ashram would be perfect for me. She says it’ll give me the chance to think about all the things that have been on my mind lately.”

“Will she go with you?” he asks. He has given up the idea that Anna is gay, but he cannot overcome his jealousy of their friendship.

“Why would you ask such a question?” Sally turns her head toward him. “She just recommended it. Besides, it’s a place you need to go to alone, Anna says.”

Does Sally confide in Anna more than she confides in him? Has she told Anna about the man she once loved? Has she told her about the poems she wrote for him?

He had dismissed Lloyd Banks in the corridor, but perhaps he was right. He should have asked. When she burned the poems, he should have talked to her then about Jack, found out if her love for him was lasting. If his memory still burns in her heart. If she still thinks of him,
now.

He begins with an apology he should have made days ago. “I’ve said some insensitive things to you, Sally,” he says.

“About Anna?”

It bothers him that she should think he means Anna, that Anna is the first thought that comes to her mind. “No,” he says, “not only about Anna.”

“She said you had a fight.” She sits up and props up the pillows behind her back.

“A misunderstanding. I was wrong and she told me so.”

“She said she had just come out of her meeting with the president of the Botanic Garden when she ran into you. She said you lit into her with your usual accusation about her using her research days for gardening.”

“Is that all she said?”

“Yes. Was there more? Did you quarrel about something else also?”

“No,” he says. Anna had covered up for him. He will cover up for her, too. “I was stupid not to realize that what she was doing was related to her classes. She was arranging tours for her students on the nature poets,” he says.

“You are so hard on Anna.”

She is about to slip back under the covers when he tries again. He wants to know if she has settled for him. He has accused her of this. He has said to Banks she married him on the rebound, but he does not want to believe it.

“I want to apologize for what I said about your relationship with Jack,” he says.

“That is in the past. I told you so.”

“But we never really discussed it.”

“I think we did.”

What he should say next is that he wants to apologize for calling her passionate love for Jack an illusion, but he takes the escape she offers him. What he does say is what is most on his mind. “I never asked you why you burned those poems.”

“I wanted to put them behind me.”

“But why did you
burn
them, Sally?”

She hears the emphasis on burn. “Burn them?” she asks.

“As opposed to tearing them up or throwing them in the garbage.”

“You ask that as if there is some special significance in my burning them.”

“Don’t you think burning them is significant?” he asks.
Fire is a symbol for passion. The symbol for passionate love.
He does not have such confidence that he can say this to her. He does not trust himself with her answer.

“Jack was a criminal,” she says. “I had burned the others. Reporters were going through my garbage. If I had a shredder, I would have shredded them. Who knows if some ambitious investigator was still following me? I didn’t want to leave more trails to me than were there already. Reporters were going through my garbage. I burned them.”

The explanation is logical.

“It’s impossible to read ashes,” she says, and puts an end to the discussion.

The day Sally leaves, the crocuses come out. The sun that had made Brooklyn so ugly just days ago is now forgiving. It melts the last of the snow still left after the rain the night before. It heats up the earth and crocuses sprout in odd places: between stone and rubble, dead limbs that have fallen off bare trees, metal that has rusted in backyards. From the centers of green leaves clumped in bouquets close to the ground, delicate pink, blue, violet, white, and purple flowers push their way out. Overnight it seems there are buds on trees. This morning, as Justin puts Sally’s suitcase in the trunk of his car, he notices them for the first time.

“They’ve been there for weeks,” Sally says when he points them out to her. “The tulips will be here soon.” In the fall, she had put tulip bulbs in the large cement planters on the pavement, in front of their brownstone house.

Giselle, too, is aware of the coming of spring. “Aunt Anna says we can plant my seeds in just a few more days, Daddy,” she says.

“When the ground thaws,” Sally tells her gently. “It’s much too early. The soil is still cold and hard.”

IT IS FRIDAY. Sally has taken a professional day off from work. She reminds Justin that very recently she used a sick day when she and Giselle had colds. She does not want to raise a red flag by using another one. They agree she has not lied: a three-day weekend at the ashram will be good for her personally as well as professionally. She will be a better teacher, they both say, when she feels less stressed.

The ashram has arranged for a bus to pick up its guests and Justin drives Sally to the meeting place. They kiss each other good-bye. There are no tears. Giselle is dry-eyed. “Mommy’ll be back before you know it,” Sally tells her. “You’ll have Daddy all to yourself.” The prospect pleases Giselle.

When they get home, Justin calls his mother. He and Giselle can visit if she is not too busy, he tells her. She is not busy, she says. Never for her son or her granddaughter.

The landscape along the Southern State Parkway is different this time. Three weeks ago when he drove to his mother’s, the snow was stretched far and wide on the banks of the parkway. Here and there some patches of white still remain, but mostly the ground is covered with a sort of brownish grass, and bordering it, in front of the pine trees, what Justin took for
bramble bush the last time he passed here is awash with yellow. Forsythia. A blaze of light surprises him at every turn on the parkway.

“March is coming out like a lamb this year,” his mother says when she greets them. “Too bad for the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.”

Giselle frowns. “Oh, Nana,” she says, “don’t say it’s too bad for Columbus’s boats.”

Her grandmother bends down and Giselle wraps her arms around her neck. “My, my, what a big girl you are.” She returns Giselle’s hug and pecks Justin on the cheek. “Nana didn’t mean anything by that,” she says. She turns to Justin. “She
is
bright. Just like you were. And she looks every bit like you, too. Do you know you look just like your daddy, pretty girl?”

“I look like my Mommy, too, Nana,” Giselle says.

“That you do, but you have your Daddy’s eyes.”

“And Daddy says I’m going to be tall,” she says.

“Well, I hope not as tall as your Daddy. He’s real tall.”

“I’ll be in-between tall,” says Giselle. “In between Mommy and Daddy. Not too tall and not too short. Just right.”

“What a smart child.” Her grandmother helps her out of her coat. “And what a beautiful dress you have on.”

“We went to take Mommy to the bus and Mommy said I could wear it. It’s not my Sunday dress, you know, Nana. It is my second to Sunday best dress, but Mommy said I could wear it because today she went away on the bus.”

Justin and his mother exchange glances but say nothing.

“Do you like it, Nana?” Giselle twirls around in front of her. It is a pretty dress. A red and green plaid with a white collar laced at the edge and black velvet trimming around the waist. She is wearing matching red ribbons in her hair.

“She likes dresses,” Justin explains when his mother asks if her legs don’t get cold.

“When I go outside, I wear pants over my pantyhose. But we didn’t go outside today. Not outside, outside. We were in the car.”

Her grandmother laughs. “Pantyhose! She’s so grown-up.”

They walk into the kitchen. “Will you stay for a while?” she asks Justin.

“A couple hours,” he says.

“Good. I’ll make lunch.”

“I don’t want you to make a fuss.”

“A fuss? It’s a pleasure. And young lady, do you want to see the toys Nana has for you in her room?” She grasps Giselle’s hand and takes her upstairs. When she comes back down, Justin is pouring water from the kettle into a mug.

“I’m making tea. Do you want some, Mother?”

“No, I’ve had enough for the morning. It makes me jumpy.”

“It’s the caffeine. Why don’t you drink decaffeinated?”

“Because it doesn’t taste like tea. Lord knows what it tastes like, but it’s not tea.”

Justin reaches into the refrigerator for the evaporated milk. His mother will not use regular milk in her tea either, another habit from Trinidad she cannot break.