The Color of Family (10 page)

He played the first thunderous chord of the Beethoven “Sonata Pathétique” that he'd take to New Orleans; doing what he had done all his life—burying those thoughts of what may or may not have been the other half of himself deeper behind the music in his mind. That half of himself that may or may not be present every time he touches his hair, or looks in the mirror at his eyes that have so much to say if only he could speak their language, or sees a half-breed in Baltimore passing for white.

So Clayton closed his eyes and let himself dissolve into the minor chords that empathized with every part of him that could not find peace in that moment. And as he played through into the second theme of the sonata headed for the third, he felt a comfort, a kinship with the multiple personalities that came together, nonetheless, to create one body.

Clayton leaned into the notes with the hope and intention of letting his angst slip between the fine cracks separating the white and the black. And it did, as he played this commanding sonata
with the brilliance of a man who could scarcely be topped in his world. The whole thing positively put him in awe of himself, because if his mother was indeed guilty of the subterfuge of hiding his true race from him and the world, what a wunderkind he'd really be. And how was it, he wondered with all earnestness and disconsolation, that no one ever found him out? Someone would have seen it in him, right? Especially blacks, and particularly blacks in New Orleans. It was always so easy for him to spot passers. No matter how fair the skin, or straight the hair, or fine the features, Clayton could tell when someone was passing—in fact, there was an opera singer with the Berlin Opera, who was originally from Mississippi but spoke as if she were straight out of the queen's court. Marion Bright he believed her name was, and she, without his doubt, was passing. But Clayton knew from where he'd come. He came from a part of the country where octoroons, and quadroons, and all other combinations were a fact of life. Someone, somewhere along the way, he thought, would have questioned his bloodline if it weren't pure.

And then he smiled, not with the beauty of what he formed beneath his fingers, but with the thought of the day he met André Watts, a man who lived quite knowingly with the duality of his selves—black and white. Clayton remembered the way he fawned with a certain awe at the way the man slid into the room with his walk as smooth as butter; a walk Clayton envied each time he remembered it for its confidence and power. The walk of a man who surely knew himself beyond merely his name. Clayton's smile faded slowly, its metamorphosis almost undetectable.

Once he finished the first movement, he barely let the final chord dissolve to its conclusion before he leaned forward and snatched up the phone that sat on the edge of the piano. He dialed. “Momma,” he said once she answered. “Where are you going? You didn't tell me before you left.” And he listened as she told him she was headed to the shopping mall to buy something for his New Orleans concert—an explanation he found most dubious. So then he asked, “Momma, I also saw a letter that seemed to have been addressed to you, torn up in the trash here in my studio. I was wondering if you tore it up, or if maybe one of the boys did it in their mischief.” And when she confirmed that she had indeed ripped up the letter, he asked, “Why did you tear it up?”
And after she gave him a sufficient enough lie, he simply replied quietly, “Okay, bye.” Then Clayton sat slouched on the stool to ponder exactly why it was so easy to believe his mother even when he knew she was lying.

 

Agnes turned off her phone and slid it back into her bag, and she wondered what had happened in the few brief minutes since she'd left her son that brought him to question her torn-up letter. How in the world could she have forgotten that she'd hastily slipped the letter into her purse as she was leaving New Orleans? She should have just thrown it out back home. But no, she had to drag it all the way to Baltimore, only to find it by surprise, rip it up, and throw it away right in front of Clayton. And who in the world, other than Clayton, would even care about a discarded letter? But then again, it didn't fall on her as such a surprise when she really gave it some thought. She believed her son just may still have every single letter ever sent to him since his first summer at sleep-away camp.

Agnes loved her son and even admired his often melancholy nature, but she believed that it was this sentimentality that would only serve to undo all she'd done to bring him to center stage. Especially if he were to know how much of her soul she'd had to sacrifice since the day his father, Emeril, died. And she thought about how he never really had her full attention, considering how the distraction of his life always kept her an inch away from him in every way—at least it seemed to her now. Agnes shuddered, then shifted as if to distance herself from the thought. Pulling her fur coat tighter around her bosom and shoulders, she snuggled into it and sank down into the seat, looking like some despondent aged starlet. Her head fell back on the seat as she looked out at the tall row houses that did not stand with nearly as much splendor as they could, or as they possibly had on a long-ago day, with their three marble steps out front along this shambled stretch of street. Thank God they were passing by too fast to really see. And she thought about what she was doing, and where she was going, and why. And what would she say, she wondered. Because she hadn't laid eyes on Antonia Jackson in close to forty-five years, yet somehow from the thumping of her heart, Agnes knew that she was more afraid of Antonia than she was of the devil.

Before Agnes knew it, they were at a crossroads, it seemed. She looked up at the street sign to see that it read
NORTH AVENUE
. It must have been the same street they were on just miles back, but out of the window the cityscape had changed to reveal somewhat better houses, even a lovely church with steeple and a funeral home right across from it that was white and bright enough to make death seem like nothing to be feared. “Driver, are we here?”

“Well, this is West Baltimore, the part of town where she lives. We're gonna be there in a few minutes; her house is on this road up here that we're gonna turn onto,” he said as he sat waiting for the light to change.

As they moved forward, Agnes suddenly felt forty-five years younger, cowering with the same insecurities that put her in the arms of Emeril, the only boy, besides Douglas Cannon, who ever bothered to look beyond the base words that had swirled around New Orleans about her. And what would she say to Antonia who, she knew, was certain to still see her as the Agnes of un-Godly ways? When she looked up at the passing street sign, it said Garrison Boulevard, and underneath the sign was the bawdiest prostitute she'd ever seen outside of Bourbon Street. Agnes's heart quickened as the woman sized up the limousine. She could just see the headlines:
DRIVER OF PIANIST'S MOM PROPOSITIONED BY STREETWALKER
. Holy cow, she thought, this is all I need. But she breathed lighter again when the woman was distracted by a more likely payoff, and she walked to a car stopped at the traffic light, then opened her coat to display her bare nakedness. This is the street? she thought. This couldn't be the street, and she wrung her hands. And when the limousine pulled to a stop beside the curb, she couldn't move.

“This is it, ma'am.”

“Thank you,” she said as she waited for him to come around and open her door. As she stepped from the car, she said, “I may be a little while. I'm not sure.”

“That's fine, ma'am. I'll be here.”

Agnes climbed the three stairs that led her to a long path that emptied at the foot of a wide set of porch steps. So she walked the path like a woman in no hurry. This place, this walk, these trees standing tall on each side of the walk to announce this grand
house took her back to New Orleans; and it was like New Orleans in every way, with this splendor of a home tucked away from a boulevard where bare-butt prostitutes, covered up with just a coat, romped up and down. She couldn't be away from New Orleans for a day without something reminding her of it. She was a daughter of the Big Easy with every drop of blood in her body, and the smells, sounds, the
laissez les bon temps rouler
spirit of the city brought about a melancholic fear-of-distance-from-it that wouldn't be shaken until she was back there. Who knew Baltimore was this colorful, she thought, as she recalled that even in the days when Clayton lived here when he was in school at the Peabody Conservatory, she'd never traveled outside of the general downtown area when she came for visits. And she knew that it must have been this taste of back home that had brought Antonia to this place.

She rang the doorbell twice before she heard Antonia shuffling through the hall to answer it. And when the door opened, Agnes stood with her fur slung dramatically around her shoulders saying, “Antonia, do you remember me? I'm—”

“I know who you are. Why did it take you so long?”

“I've been a little busy.”

Antonia took Agnes in with every sense she had, then said, her tone laden with bitter sarcasm, “Well, I'm glad that whatever it took you to finish is finally done after forty years.”

“May I come in, cher?” Agnes inquired, holding herself so uncomfortably she felt positively tortured.

“Yes, I think you should. And don't give me that cher nonsense. This is not New Orleans.”

Agnes stepped into the front hall and looked around at its grandeur. And Antonia had it fixed up so nice, she thought, with a Louis XIV knock-off fainting couch in just the right place underneath the staircase. “This is lovely,” she said as Antonia guided her into the living room where she went over and sat on the sofa. Antonia, though, sat in the chair on the other side of the coffee table, facing Agnes.

“So Antonia Racine…well, Jackson now,” Agnes said, as if their relationship had ever been such that this type of small-talk was appropriate. “So you went and married Jackson, huh?”

“Yes I did, Agnes, in spite of the fact that his mother was actu
ally simple-minded enough to name him Jackson Jackson,” Antonia said without warmth.

“She gave him some kind of funny middle name, too, didn't she?”

“Jackson Junior Jackson.”

“Yeah,” Agnes said, laughing. “That mother-in-law of yours sure was eccentric, and that's puttin' it mighty kindly.”

Antonia looked at her and slid her mouth sideways before saying, “Agnes, she's only considered eccentric in New Orleans. Any other part of the world they'd call her what she was—touched. But then again, who's to say. After all, nearly everybody down there called me fou-fou Antonia since I can remember just because I carried my cat around in a basket all the time. And there are some who still think I'm fou-fou. Well, we'll just see how fou-fou I really am.” Antonia was deadpan in a way that made it difficult to tell if this were a part of some sort of latent dry humor, or if it were simply some mean-spirited statement of fact-according-to-Antonia.

“So how is Jackson, Antonia?”

“Not as alive as he once was, but not as dead as he could be.” There was nothing that could be heard in her flatness that would indicate whether her sarcasm was meant to shock in jest or wound with a jab.

“I see,” Agnes said nervously.

“Listen, Agnes, I know you didn't come here to talk about my husband's ridiculous name or about what a character his mother was. What do you want? Have you finally decided to respond to my letters?”

“Antonia, I want to ask you what you think you know.”

Before she answered, she got up and said, “I'll be right back, Agnes,” and she left the room, seemingly for some urgent matter. When she came back in less than a half minute, there was a lump in her pocket that wasn't there when she left. She entered talking. “I don't
think
I know anything!” she said defensively. “I
know
that your son is my brother's boy and I told you in the letters why I know it's so. And for the first time since the day you brought him into this world, I'm going to make you accountable for the decisions you've made since that day to cover up his race and deny my brother. I have told you in my letters over all these years that I know that the timing was never right.

“That baby was born a full month and a half earlier than it would have been if he had been Douglas's. I told you, I was watching you and I know the exact day you and Douglas had sex for the first time. You brought him to the same place where you lay with my brother down in the Garden District when you were babysitting for that little boy and girl, and I know 'cause I saw you take him in there and then I stood underneath the window while you two went at it.” Antonia hung her head as if embarrassed by such voyeurism, then said, “Anyway, I saw you. And I'm telling you, it does not add up. And the only thing more amazing than you thinking you could get away with it, Agnes Cannon, was Douglas actually believing that that baby was his, which could easily make him the stupidest man ever to be born in the state of Louisiana—and that takes some doing.”

Antonia shifted where she sat to reposition the lump in her pocket. “Agnes, I'm not stupid. I knew about you and Emeril when you two thought you were being so careful. I tried to stop my brother. You're just not the kind of woman who's worth a man risking his life for. Do you remember that day when you met Emeril at the Dupreses' house for a romp and somebody rang on the doorbell like crazy?” Antonia paused as if she was going to give Agnes a chance to answer, but she didn't as she continued, “Well, I was hiding underneath the willow tree when you came up, and that was me who rang the bell that day, but you know that.” Antonia stood up to pace. It wasn't working, because it was clear as she held herself in a clench that went from her jaw on down that her annoyance was beginning to peak into anger when she said, “But when I saw that child once he started making a name for himself as a concert pianist, I paid real close attention because he started looking more and more like his father. And I'll tell you, he looks as white as any white man I've ever seen, but I still know he's black. I still know he's kin.”