The Color of Family (20 page)

Aaron put a forkful of collard greens in his mouth, then labored to chew them, shocked by their coldness. He took a sip of cola that was but a thin film of water on the top from the melting ice. Then, resting his fork on his plate, he looked firmly at his father and said, “Poppa, Ma would kill me if she knew that I was telling you this—”

“Then don't tell me.”

“No, I have to tell you, just so that you can see the odd behavior we're talking about that just might be caused by a chemical imbalance.” He cinched his forehead, thinking for only the briefest second about the trust he was about to breach, then said, “Whenever you go down to Tulane to your board meetings, Ma moves all the furniture around in the house. And she's been doing this for years. I know because I help her do it.”

Junior gave Aaron a sideways stare with a twisted smile, then let loose a burst of a guffaw. “You think I don't know what she does when I leave town after forty-two years of being married to that woman, and then knowing her forever before that?”

“You know?”

“Of course I know. I also know that she's been feeding those prostitutes out on the boulevard for the last two years, too. But I've known about the furniture for years.” He pointed a playful finger of shame at his son and said, “But I didn't know you were helping her. I'm not quite sure how I figured she did all that moving, or for that matter exactly what she moved, but I had no idea you were her partner in crime.”

Aaron let his hands drop into his lap as his shoulders slumped south. Cocking his head sideways, he turned to his father and said, “How in the world did you know?”

“Oh, just in little things. Like the way she never really moves everything back to where it's supposed to be. Some things will be a little askew, and some things are in an altogether different place. The funny thing is, I'll put them back in their right place and she
doesn't even notice. After a couple dozen times of coming home and finding things out of place only to have to fix them, I started to put it all together.”

“Why didn't you ever tell her that you know? I mean, if you told her that you know, then maybe she wouldn't have to do it all the time and then she could rearrange the furniture just the way she wants it.”

“Well now, why would I do that? I like my furniture just the way it is. The way things are now works just fine. She gets what she wants when I'm away, and when I come back, my house is just the way I want it.”

Aaron smiled sardonically, letting his eyes fall into his lap. He almost told his father his true thoughts on such lunacy, but he thought better of it when he remembered that it had very little to do with the matter at hand. So he looked head-on at his father and said, “Well, are you for it, Poppa? Do you agree with Ellie and me—but mostly Ellie—that Ma needs to see a professional about this thing with Clayton Cannon?”

Junior rose slowly from where he sat, then stepped to one side and slid his chair to the table. He put his hand on Aaron's shoulder, then squeezed with what seemed to be the warmth of a father feeling the pain of his son. “I don't see where it could hurt things. I do love your mother, but I am a medical man too, so I do take into consideration that there could be a chemical imbalance that would explain so many things about her that I could never make heads nor tails of about her except simply to say that it was just her way. The problem might be getting her there, though. But you kids go ahead and do what you think you need to do.” He let go of Aaron's shoulder and gave him a soft pat on his back. And as he walked past Rick he did the same. Then he went to the chair that sat in the living room, just beyond the indiscernible demarcation where the dining room becomes the living room, and picked up his coat. As he snaked his arms into the sleeves he gave his son a fair enough warning. “I've got to get on home now, but I just want you to remember one thing, son. I know your mother, and the one thing you can count on is that she's going to kick and holler and resist this; and even through all of that, if you do manage to get her to a doctor, she will carry a grudge against you and your sister as if it had handles. So, if you two are prepared to deal with that,
then go through with this and I will be right there with all of you. Just do me a favor. Go in there and ask Ellie who she's planning to take her to see, because if it's somebody over at the hospital chances are good that your mother and I will know him, and that wouldn't be a comfortable situation for your mother at all.”

Aaron rose and went swiftly into the kitchen. And when he walked through the door, he didn't immediately find his sister. So he called for her, and when he heard her whimpering answer and then saw her bent over the counter, clutching her stomach, he went completely cold. Every instinct he had to scream was taken over by his inability to accept that there was something wrong. “Ellie, what is it?” he asked quickly.

“It's the baby, Aaron. Tell Rick that I'm in labor.”

Aaron said nothing as he turned on his heels and left the kitchen as steady as flowing brook-water. But when he got back into the dining room, all evenness was lost when he bellowed at Rick, as if Rick should have sensed that his baby was on its way, “Come on, man, get in there! Ellie's in labor, and she cannot have that baby in the kitchen! It's not due for a week and being born on a kitchen floor is just not going to be a good thing for it.” Aaron sat down at the table before his pounding heart would steal away every ounce of strength that kept his knees from completely buckling beneath him. He slumped back in the chair and watched as everyone hustled, and listened as the whirl of wind in the room became more indefinable and muffled. And all the commotion to call the doctor and get her to the hospital made him angry—angry that Ellie had to bring her mulish self out on a night like this, angry that his mother had preordained this night so many years before. But mostly, he was seething with a newly steeped hatred at the fate that brought his stark nemesis, who was the only living creature standing between him and his mother, right there to Baltimore again, only fifteen minutes away and almost near enough to touch.

A
ntonia took jerky, skittish steps, as she approached the bench in front of the Science Center where she'd sat just a few weeks before, watching the door of the Harbor Court Towers for a glimpse of Clayton. She was at least twenty minutes early, and it was the middle of January, for goodness sakes, far too cold to sit on the bench as if it were a lazy, balmy day just right for watching strollers. And so it was no wonder that she caught more than a few stares of passersby. But she couldn't feel the cold. Her mind had ducked inside and taken the elevator up to the penthouse—he had to live in the penthouse because that's what tortured musical geniuses do—and into Clayton's musical retreat.

She had fashioned him as tortured since she'd tried to imagine him as a young man studying piano at Peabody. Tormented in his world of notes, sharps and flats, majors and minors—mostly minors—with no one truly able to understand what drove his soul. Tortured in the way in which he, himself, couldn't fully understand his genius—all he knew, as she imagined him, was that he had to play, and if he didn't, he'd die. Mostly, though, angst-ridden because there was a cavernous gap in the soul that he tried desperately to fill with music, written from the beleaguered souls of others. To be in that world in which he lived, of formal music written, at least initially, for patrician ears, would require a meticulous high-brow mystique foreign to the average bayou man. And inside his music den, which must have been
darkened, lit only by sparkling crystal chandeliers, were old paintings of famous composers and furniture no one could ever picture fitting with ease into their own home; and busts—only one of himself—of some such stone or bronze carved with immortality in mind, she was sure. A place that was decorated as if no one from recent centuries had been inside it, except for the table, set for some sort of imminent formal meal—because in her mind, that's how he took his meals. Alone. Solitary. And his repast was heavy with the aura of the long-ago communality of souls once he filled it with their music.

And so there she sat, her mind back outside with the rest of her in the cold on a bench, clutching her purse like a lifeline. Then she heard the voice of a woman descending the steps of the Science Center speaking, possibly, to her.

“Ma'am, are you lost?” a black-coated woman said. She had a striking, fine-featured, yet no-nonsense and unsmiling face, which made Antonia wonder why she even cared.

“I'm fine, thank you,” Antonia said, offering the woman a smile, thinking she'd get one in return, which she did. “You have a nice day, now.”

“You do the same,” the woman said with a smile as she walked on her way. “And go on in out of the cold, now.”

The woman walked off, leaving Antonia alone again, the cold exacerbating the fact. She watched the woman disappear down by the Rusty Scupper. Without being conscious of it, her fingers drummed nervously against her purse. And why would a pretty girl be eating alone? Antonia assumed, since the woman was walking alone, and went into the restaurant alone.

Well, they grow women differently these days than they did when my mother was raising me, she thought, and she smiled. Especially when she thought about raising Ellen, who nearly brought her first grandchild into the world the night before. Either through the water or the air, Antonia thought with a shadowy smile as intangible as memory itself, Ellen got something into her as she was being raised up that made her just want to grab for everything—first being the smartest doctor Antonia had ever seen, except for maybe Junior, and then being pregnant at forty-one for the first time, for goodness' sake. Then she let that thought dissolve into the harbor as she began to paw through her
purse trying to scrounge up a mint, but mostly to quiet her pounding fingers, asking herself aloud, “Why are you so nervous? Just calm yourself. He can bring a crowd to its feet with his piano playing, but before he could do all that, he was your nephew, for crying out loud.”

So Antonia checked her watch once more and saw that in her daydreams of the man Clayton must now be, she had let fifteen minutes pass by. She rose from the bench, and walked toward the crosswalk. A strong gust of wind kicked up while she waited for the light to take the long trek across Light Street. Once the light had changed, she stepped lively across the street and studied the towers of Harbor Court—up and down she looked, then side to side, and by the time she had reached the median smack in the middle of the street, she was certain that this place was where the old McCormick Spice Company once sat.

She reached the front door where she stood, first looking one way, then the other until she finally had to concede to her made-up mind that it was possible that McCormick had not been in this spot at all, but perhaps just across the street on the other corner. And then she smiled, comforted by the memories of those smells that were so strong it seemed as if they still lingered in the leafless trees or perhaps in a stationary cloud somewhere up above. She went back to a summer day, not one in particular, but any summer day along the harbor with the perfume of cinnamon wafting through the air like an exotic seductress, making her long for something more to sate every sense. It didn't much matter which spice they were preparing for market—cumin, turmeric, allspice—it all made her miss New Orleans, with its bouquet of the food unique only to the Crescent City. Food—that's what it meant to her to miss New Orleans. And to miss Emeril and Creole spices.

By the time she finally got herself into the lobby of the Harbor Court Towers, there she was, walking across the lobby at a clip.

“Antonia, honey, there you are,” Agnes said.

Antonia went to her as if she just might oblige Agnes's want to embrace and said, “Where are they?” She had waited long enough, and she wanted to meet her nephew and his family. So she looked behind Agnes to the elevator through which she assumed Agnes had just come, then around the lobby, as if per
haps they had appeared during the few seconds her eyes were on Agnes.

Agnes, with her eyes squinted, looked at Antonia, then behind her, following Antonia's gaze. “Where are who, honey?”

“Where are Clayton and his family? That's why I'm here, isn't it?” she said in a tone that would make it clear that there was no point to her staying if they weren't going to be around.

“Honey, I'm sorry, but Clayton's in New York about to catch a plane to Milan,” she said, her twang bringing it out of her mouth sounding like
M'Laan.
Then she shrugged and said, “And Susan and the boys wouldn't be here. Susan's over at the house, and the boys are in school. I told you to come and meet me down here because I thought you might like it, and because it seems to me that our conversation wasn't finished from the other day.”

Antonia took a step back, and when she tightened her face she stared at Agnes as if through a tunnel and said, “Don't give me that, Agnes. I'm not stupid, and I know you're more conniving than that. You planned it this way because there's no way you were going to have me down here while he was here. Isn't that true?”

“Antonia, that is simply not true.”

“Don't lie to me, Agnes. We've got too much history, and you know I know you.”

Agnes pushed out an exasperated breath, as if it were meant to blow Antonia right out of there. Then she started toward a door on the other end of the lobby and turned to Antonia, saying, “Well, are you coming or not?”

So Antonia followed her through the door and up an escalator and into a restaurant. And when they entered the dining room, the tables, every single one, sparkled like Christmas ornaments from the crystal that caught the low lights that shone through the prisms of even more crystal hung in the chandeliers. Antonia looked around the room and said, “My, this really is lovely. But you still haven't answered my question, Agnes.”

“All right, Antonia. You're right,” Agnes snapped. “I did know that he wasn't going to be here, but I really do believe that we've got much more to talk about so let's just get to our table so that we can get on with it, okay?”

A man dressed in a business-black suit approached them. He
had the tightened stride of landed gentry, which he could have carried off had he not spoken to let his South Baltimore drawl slide out to reveal his true station. “Do you have a reservation?” he asked as the overpronounced
r
in
reservation
told his tale.

“Agnes Cannon. Reservation for two,” Agnes said confidently.

Actually, with more confidence than Antonia ever thought Agnes could have. It's amazing, Antonia thought, what high living off of a famous son can do. But then she imagined, as she followed Agnes and the waiter to the table, that Agnes must feel constantly like a catfish in the ocean. Completely out of her element, and always looking from side to side to make certain she's correct; knowing that she's breathing air, yet feeling as if she's suffocating with every futile breath she attempts to take.

As she sat, Agnes smoothed her dress underneath her with the unnatural movements of a woman unaccustomed to such feminine protocol, then laid her napkin across her lap in an equally pretentious manner. Once the maitre d' had gone away, Agnes said, “All right, Antonia, you're right. I brought you here because I thought you were going to do something rash.”

Antonia shifted where she sat and studied the young man busily filling the water glasses. When he finished, she said,
“And?…”

Antonia could feel in every part of herself that could sense and know that there was more to Agnes's motivation. If she would just say it, just once in her misguided life tell the truth, at least Antonia could believe that staying there wouldn't be in vain. And she stared determinedly at Agnes for her answer, and when it wasn't instantaneously forthcoming, she said, “You tell me the rest of it right now, or so help me God, I'll walk right out of here and the next time we talk it will be with Clayton. I was at the hospital with my daughter till one this morning because we thought she was in labor and I'm working on very little sleep. I'm tired and I'm short on patience and you're about to test me in a way I don't think you should.”

“Okay, Antonia,” Agnes responded desperately. Then she diverted her eyes out the window and onto the gray harbor and continued softly, “
And
I wanted to bring you here because I hoped that if you were able to come here to the place where Clayton lives, then maybe that would be enough for you, and then maybe
you'd leave Clayton alone. Now, can we please just have a nice lunch? The food here is simply the best.”

Antonia wouldn't move, as she looked around at all the old splendor in the room. She smiled thinly and said, “Now doesn't that feel good, Agnes? That must have been the first honest thing you've said to me since I've known you. But just to set the record straight, if all I wanted to do was come to the place where Clayton lives and skulk around and eat lunch like some star-struck groupie, I could have done that by myself and a long time ago.”

Agnes only smiled, then said, “I suppose you could.” Shifting the subject with the gentility of true southernness, she continued, “If you like prawn salad, they make quite a good one here. It's on the prix fixe lunch menu.”

“I like it well enough,” Antonia said, trying to remember when she'd last had prawn salad. Then she decided it didn't matter, since such dishes hardly have a universal rule of preparation and so would most likely taste different than the last, whatever that tasted like. And it didn't much matter anyway, since she wasn't really there to eat. So, lacking for anything else to say to fill in the silence, she said, “The table looks lovely.”

“Yes it does. This is a fine, fine restaurant,” Agnes replied with the wonderment that said the elegance of her son's perquisites were still like a dream to her. “Clayton says it's been written up in
Baltimore
magazine, and even
Zagat
, too. And you know, on the prix fixe menu, they have pralines-and-cream for dessert. I remember just how much you love your pralines.” Agnes picked up her water glass, and before sipping from it said, “So you say your daughter had false-alarm labor last night?”

“That's right. She was at my son's house with her husband, and Junior was there too,” she said, then Antonia picked up her water glass. She sipped and lingered over the distraction of having forgotten to ask what the family were all doing at Aaron's house together in the first place. True enough, she knew Junior was going to Aaron's. But what was Ellen doing there? And if Ellen and Rick were there having a big old family get-together, why wasn't she there too? Somebody had some secrets to tell about whisperings behind her back. Then, setting her water back in its place, she tucked her suspicion away and continued, “It turned
out to be indigestion. She'd just eaten too much over at her brother's house.”

“Oh yeah, that's common. I remember when Susan was pregnant with the boys. We made no less than three dashes to the hospital only to find out that it wasn't really labor. By the time they really were ready to come, they came so fast the doctors didn't even have time to get her out of her dress. That was some night, I'll tell you.”

“Sounds like it,” Antonia said, laughing without the burden of the last forty-five years bearing down on her. She held back, as she saw the waiter approaching. But before she let him ask, Antonia spoke up. “I think we'll both have the prix fixe lunch.” Then, realizing she'd just spoken for Agnes, she looked at her with widened eyes of contrition and asked, “Is that what you want too?”

“Yes, that's fine. That's just what I was going to order,” Agnes said, more to Antonia than to the waiter.

And only when he left did Antonia continue. “So, anyway, I was just beside myself with happiness when Junior called me and said Ellen was in labor. I've had two children and I know what that's like, but I suppose there's nothing like the moment when your first grandchild comes into the world. I'm just so excited, Agnes.” And Antonia was positively giddy.