“I can't let it kill me,” he said to himself, as he nursed a blinding headache, “and I can't give up on her. I have to help her straighten out her life. No matter what she does, she's my child.”
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Kellie trudged up the stairs a beaten person. Where was she going to find money to rent and furnish an apartment? She couldn't stay with Lacette; indeed, she didn't want to. She sat on the bed, kicked off her shoes and stared at the telephone, wishing it would ring and she could go to meet Hal and show them that she didn't need them. Not any of them.
She heard her mother's footsteps rushing up the stairs and hoped that Cynthia wouldn't stop at her door but would go on to her own room. Air seeped out of her, and she could feel herself shrinking when the door opened and her mother walked in without knocking.
Cynthia closed the door and let it support her back. “Tonight, for the first time, I saw you as you really are, as a greedy, self-obsessed hedonist who's oblivious to the rights of other people and who has no concern for other people's feelings. Yes, that's what you are.” She didn't wipe the tears that wet her cheeks, her chin and then her dress. “And the terrible thing is that I saw my role in it.”
“Mama, please. I don't want to hear it.”
Cynthia raised her hand just high enough to signal her determination to have her say. “But you
will
hear it. I didn't say one word when you berated me in the presence of my husband and my daughter, Lacette, who didn't know until tonight why Marshall left me.”
Kellie turned toward the window. She was not going to listen to it. After all she'd done to get that brooch, and still she would never wear it . . . She jumped up from where she sat on the edge of her bed and started for the door. “You can talk all you want to, but I don't have to listen while you regurgitate a bunch of stuff I've heard a dozen times,
and I won't.
”
Cynthia's hand shot out, detaining her. “You haven't heard it from me. So you listen. I catered to your whims even when I knew it was wrong, that I should have corrected you, refused you and punished you.
“I indulged you when I should have denied your demands, and I did that many times at Lacette's expense. It hurts me now to think how she must have suffered and that it was my fault, because I failed her as her mother.”
“Oh, Mama. For the Lord's sake. Please spare me the melodrama.”
The increased pressure of her mother's fingers digging into her arm startled her, for Cynthia's hands had not heretofore done other than caress and stroke her. She tried to pull away but Cynthia, who was almost three inches shorter, stood straighter and held firm. “You're the queen of melodrama. After that act you pulled downstairs, you should be quiet indefinitely. I thank God that Lacette had Marshall for support. She's grown up to be a . . .” Her voice wavered. “She's a fine woman, and I'm proud of her. I . . . I hope she can forgive me.”
Kellie wanted to go where she wouldn't be reminded of Lacette, the brooch or the mess she'd made of her life because of it. “Mama, will you please let go of me, and let me pass?”
“After I finish my story, you may go wherever you like. You delighted in exposing me to Lacette. So, listen! For almost thirty-five years, I was your father's faithful slave. I promoted his career at the expense of my own education, bore and raised his children with less help from him than I needed, worked tirelessly in his various churches and allowed myself to be a doormat for his parishioners who acted as if they owned me.
“In all those years, I didn't have a self. I was a faceless, shapeless woman, cooking, cleaning, grinning and bowing, a shadow of a person whose own children didn't take her seriously. Marshall was contented with life as we had it, possibly because I never complained. Our love life wasn't worth a walk across the porch. For the first four or five years of our marriage, he tried to put some life into me, to give me as much in our intimate relations as he received, but I was so seeped in the puritanical doctrines of the church and the often articulated views of my own righteous mother that I couldn't respond. He eventually gave up trying.
“On my fiftieth birthday, I realized I had nothing I'd dreamed of as a young, single girl, that I had suppressed my will and my dreams for what society thought I should be and do, and I guess the seeds of rebellion were planted that day. We were all celebrating my fifty-fifth birthday when, as I looked at my husband and my children, it occurred to me that I'd been married for over a third of a century and had never had an orgasm. That was the first day that I felt genuine resentment and anger about my life. So when a certain man said to me one Sunday evening as I left church, âWhy do you do this? Don't you want anything for yourself? ' tears gushed out of me like water from a fountain, and before I knew it I was in his arms.
“That was the beginning. Two weeks later, he made a satisfied woman of me. If we weren't together, I was scheming for opportunities to be with him. All day, no matter what I was doing or where I was, if I wasn't with him, I was burning to get to him. I took all kinds of chances. I would have walked through fire to be alone with him. I couldn't get enough of him, and when I took a stupid chance, your father caught me. That's what I regret most. Not so much that Marshall knows about it as that he witnessed it. I owed him more than that.”
While Cynthia talked, Kellie focused on the picture of herself and Lacette as four-year-olds dressed for church in yellow dresses, yellow and white pinafores and white hats with yellow flowers on the brim. She tried not to hear her mother's words, for to hear and understand them might impel her to sympathize with her mother, and she didn't want to do that.
“Look, Mama. I've got a headache. I can't deal with all that.”
“I am not asking you to deal with it. You've criticized me. I heard you tell Lacette that I was chasing my youth. I am not foolish, and I know my youth is behind me. But I have a right to feel like a woman, to look great, wear pretty clothes and smile back when a man smiles at me. I have the right to wear a perfume other than that Azure stuff my husband gave me every one of the thirty-five birthdays I had while we were together, and my feet will never test another pair of Reebocks or other sneakers.” She walked out as she came in, without a warning. Simply left.
Kellie lowered her head and rubbed the fingers of her left hand across her forehead. Back and forth. Over and over. Unaccustomed to self-pity and annoyed with herself, she turned on the little radio that rested on her night table hoping to change her mood. But the sound of Luther's voice caressing the words of “Love Me Tonight” did nothing to raise her spirits.
“If she told the truth about why she had an affair,” Kellie reasoned aloud, “why doesn't she understand why I can't stay away from Hal, why I don't want to stay away from him? And why I won't?”
In her mind's eye, she saw the answer to her question as images of his slovenly ways, his unkempt appearance and poor hygiene habits flashed through her memory. She crossed her legs and tightened her muscles in an effort to recreate the feeling she got when he pounded into her. The telephone rang, and she lunged for it.
“Hello. This is Kellie.”
“I'll be in front of the church in fifteen minutes.”
“Okay,” she said, eschewing any semblance of hesitation. She pulled off her clothes, slipped into a long paisley skirt that had a slit up the left thigh, added a tight red sweater, slung her pocketbook over her shoulder and sped downstairs.
“Where're you going?” Cynthia called after her.
“Out.” She got a jacket from the closet in the hall foyer and raced to meet Hal.
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After allowing the telephone to ring nearly a dozen times, Lacette hung up and faced the fact that she longer had instant access to the members of her family; her parents' separation had, among its many sequelae, a rupturing of the daily routines to which she was accustomed. She couldn't count on her mother being at home whenever she called or her father leaving and returning home with clock-like regularity.
Did she even have a family?
Kellie's accusations of her mother had stunned her, but the real pain she felt came from her mother's calm acceptance of Kellie's vicious assault.
Although she could only surmise that infidelity was at the root of her parents' breakup, she didn't know the details, nor was she sure that she wanted to know them. She dialed her father's number, and when he didn't respond, she got ready for bed, took a copy of Ann Petry's novel,
The Street,
from her bookcase and settled into bed. She read several pages before realizing that, in choosing Petry's novel, she was trying to understand women of easy virtue. Women like her sister. Tears soaked the pages of her book, but she couldn't stop their flow. How had her relations with her sister splintered into nothing? She closed the book and tried to sleep, but at sunrise, six hours later, she still struggled to fall asleep for even one minute.
“You all right?” Lourdes asked Lacette when she arrived at her office nearly thirty minutes after the beginning of office hours. “You seem kinda pooped.”
“I
am
pooped. Nothing drains your energy like fighting for sleep all night. Any calls?”
“Mr. Rawlins wants you to call him at eleven. Nimble Fingers requested a call back as soon as you get in.”
“Thanks.” She made the business call first. “I can do that,” she said in response to a request by the manager of Nimble Fingers that she design and place the company's ads in strategic TV and radio markets. Satisfied that her fledgling business had taken another step upward, she was in high spirits when she telephoned Douglas.
“Can you get the afternoon off or at least the better part of it?” he asked her.
“Why, yes, if it's important. What's up?”
“I'd like you to go with me to look at some property. It's ideal for my purposes as a landscaper, and that may blind me to its inadequacy in other respects. I need land on which to grow plants and shrubs and to test varieties. I could also build a nursery. You'd see the house and its accommodations. The seller has another bidder, so I can't shilly-shally about my decision.”
She hesitated long enough to remember that it was the only thing he had asked of her and that, as her own boss, she could come and go as she pleased. “What time?”
“You'll do it? You'll go with me?”
His elation shamed her for, to her mind, she was not making a sacrifice but would be doing something she'd enjoy. “Can we eat lunch on the way?”
“Great idea. Let's take the van, and I'll bring you back to your car. I'd go after four-thirty, but your father called me this morning to reemphasize his determination to move into his house within the next two weeks. He doesn't need landscaping for that, but I think he wants changes so he'll feel that it's his. Can we leave about one?”
“Okay. I'll meet you in the hotel lobby.”
Before leaving, she managed to place radio ads for Nimble Fingers, but she had to accept that getting the TV spots on terms acceptable to her client would not be as easy. She met Doug in the lobby and nearly betrayed her feelings to him, when his left arm went around her and his lips against hers sent shivers throughout her nervous system.
Douglas drove along West All Saints Street, the heart of Frederick's African American life from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the 1900s. “Ever been in that house?” she asked him, pointing to number twenty-two, which once housed the studio of William Grinage, the African-American portrait painter who painted the most widely recognized image of Francis Scott Key.
“Sure I have.” I wonder how many of our schoolchildren know that Grinage was a black man who supplemented his income as a waiter by painting. He painted Key because the local Kiwanis Club commissioned him to do it.”
“Every time I drive out All Saints Street, I think about the suffering of the people who once lived there and of all the great things some of them did.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like establishing hospitals and schools because the existing ones would not accommodate blacks.” He turned into Market Street and drove for about a mile.
“Are we going outside Frederick?” she asked him, hoping he'd say no.
“We're stopping at the border.” I know a roadside restaurant there where you can eat all the crab cakes you want.”
After lunch, he drove about half a mile down the road and turned into a short lane that she imagined would be overhung with foliage by mid-July. He stopped at a gray stone, two-story country house and parked. “This place once belonged to a couple who lived in their old age as recluses, and it hasn't been kept in prime condition, although it's not in bad shape.”
“Who's selling it?” she asked him.
“I'm told that their granddaughter is the seller.”
“Are you likely to have trouble with your neighbors, because you're black?”