She was still as a pond at sunset, and as pale. Her face was turned toward him, her eyes closed, a smile playing across her face, her hair a brilliant yellow fan in the Japanese lamp’s light, the soft silk shade of the lamp fringed with golden, like her hair. Her eyes were black slits, like the Japanese lady’s and, even though she was here, in the room, in the bed on top of the tangled bedsheets, she seemed to be far away, as though she had been turned inside out, as Sam had himself turned around backward in his bed, sometime, sometime before this, before this time which was the only time that ever existed.
Her white white skin was as thin as the silk of the lampshade. He could see the veins of her body through her skin, and she was all softness, without muscle, no way to move, covered as she was, although she arched her back and rose into Charlie and then fell again against the white sheets.
Sam didn’t know what to make of it; he didn’t know what was happening, whether he was watching a scene of violence or tenderness, so fine was the line, but he knew he must not, could not move. Whatever was happening, it was happening only to them, happening on their skin and in their bodies.
The noises they made were not speaking, but they were saying something, not even to each other, each was speaking to himself but not with words, with sounds he had never heard, and their bodies, moving together, made noise, a sucking sound like boots in soft mud. Somehow, Sam knew. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be seeing this, it was a private thing, like the way he wasn’t supposed to open the door when somebody else was in the bathroom. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be hearing these sounds, that they were private sounds and that, whatever they were saying, it wasn’t meant for him to hear.
But the sounds coming from them were getting stronger, her head moving slowly side to side, the breath coming in short bursts from Charlie, not from his nose, but from his mouth. Somebody was going to get hurt. Somebody was in pain. He could no longer tell which sounds were coming from which person, they seemed to come together from somewhere else in the room, and he wished the Japanese lamp lady would turn her head away, he wished he could leave the spot where he stood in the doorway, but he couldn’t.
He wet his pants. He felt the warmth flowing into his jeans and he was suddenly ashamed. And then he started crying, at first without a sound, and then louder, and then howling, and that changed everything, she heard him, only Sylvan, Charlie lost in his own howling breath, and she slapped Charlie on the shoulder, once, quick, hard and flat, red as a flat quick hand on a hot woodstove, screamed, “Charlie! Charlie, the boy!” and Charlie, wild and bucking, looked up, saw the boy and suddenly everything moved, their bodies, their faces, the bedsheets, the Japanese lady toppling off the table and shattering on the floor so that the room was thrown into near darkness, deep violet, but not so dark that Sam could not see Charlie’s body, his whole body at once. Charlie covered himself with a sheet, ashamed like Adam in the sight of God as he leapt away from Sylvan, rolled like a cat onto the floor and raced and fell on his knees and clutched Sam in his arms and held his shaking body against his chest, shushing him, whispering in his ear, quick hands smoothing his hair, his back, wiping the tears from his face, kissing his cheek, his neck, something he’d never done before, catching his breath and saying, finally, “It’s all right, Sam. It’s nothing. It’s over now. Please, Sam. Everything’s fine.”
Just holding him, not caring that Sam’s pants were wet and he was afraid and ashamed, just holding him in his arms, relaxed now, not caring that his naked body was pressed against Sam’s clothes. “It’s all right, Sam. Sam, look at me.”—and he did—“It’s fine. It’s fine, son.”
He held him until he stopped crying, Charlie’s shoulders slick now with his own sweat and Sam’s tears, until Sam was calm and stood back from Charlie, stood on his own, looking over Charlie’s shoulders to see Sylvan sitting in the bed, sheets wrapped tightly around her, braiding her hair as though nothing had happened, had just happened in this room, everything different for ever after, the light gone from rose to violet and moving now to black, the Japanese lady and the lightbulb broken forever in a thousand pieces on the floor.
“Okay? Okay now? We’ll go home, buddy. We’ll go home to your mama and daddy.”
“But I don’t know where Jackie Robinson is.”
“We’ll find him. Don’t worry. He’ll come when we call. He’s a good dog. And Sam? Sam? You’re good boy. Just wait downstairs. Just wait a minute and I’ll be down.”
Sam did as he was told. He went downstairs and he waited. Charlie was there almost right away, his shirt open, his shoes in his hand. The kitchen was bright, and Charlie dropped his heavy shoes on the linoleum floor, buttoned and tucked his white shirt in his pants, and sat to lace up. Then he stood, and took Sam by the hand, and they stepped on the porch, and Jackie came almost right away at Charlie’s first whistle. Then they were in the truck, back and turning quickly, the cab heating up, and everything was just the way it always was, Charlie telling the jokes, Sam laughing even when he didn’t understand, Jackie curled between them, the dog’s feet in Charlie’s lap, his head in Sam’s, and nothing and everything had changed and Sam didn’t know how he knew that, but he did, he did know it. He knew it like blood. He knew it like the sound of the Japanese lamp breaking on the floor. He knew it like a dream of turning around in bed, of waking up in a house that was not his house, with people who were not his people.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SHE HAD ON a green cardigan sweater, worn backward, buttoned up the back. It was exactly the color of her eyes, and she knew it. The lady who sold it to her, at Grossman’s, had pointed that out to her—that green, the color of the lichen that grew on the sides of the trees that rose from the side of the river. Her eyes the same, lichen green, almost gray in some lights, at certain times of day, but always with an undercurrent of green. Eyes like bright, quick fish swimming in winter water, they never stopped moving, never gazed at anything for very long, except for Charlie, and except for her own face, which she could look at for hours in the mirror.
She sat on the porch steps at Pickfair, the cool early summer breeze just barely lifting her blonde hair, blonder now, from the nape of her neck, and she pulled her skirt down over her knees and leaned forward, hugging her arms around her legs, her head resting on the turquoise cotton of a billowing skirt.
“I was listening to the radio one time, and something funny happened,” she said.
Charlie, hearing her voice, loved her so much at that moment he felt his heart might explode in his chest at any minute. He loved her so much he felt his bones would break. Loving her was like lying in a bed of nettles, and the feel of her skin against his was the only balm, the only time the stinging stopped, while, for her, he was the warm bath she took to stave off the cold waterfall of Boaty’s indifference.
“It was my show, you know, The Romance of Helen Trent. I just love her. I love the way she stands up for herself, struggles to the top of her profession. But I especially love the way she talks. I wish I could meet her one day.
“Anyway, she and Gil, her boyfriend, was . . .”
“Were.” said Charlie. “They were . . .”
“Thank you. Were talking, thank you, and Gil was asking her to marry him, the way he always does, even though he knows she’ll say no, he asks her because he loves her, and she loves him, too, but she can’t, you know, give herself to him because she has to think of her professional career, and all those people who would stab her in the back the first chance they got, just to get to the top before her. So she was saying no, and he kept asking her, and then something really funny happened. You want to know what it was?”
“I want to know why she won’t marry him,” Charlie said.
“I told you. Her professional career. Her duty to be the best Helen she can be. Like I said. She doesn’t want to be dashed against the rocks of despair. They tell you that at the beginning of every show. But you want to know what happened?”
“Sure.”
“So Gi
l was asking, and she was saying no, and then it went real quiet for a minute, and you could her a man’s voice, and he said it real loud, he said, ‘Ah, for Christ’s sake, why don’t you just lay the dame and get it over with!’ You could hear it clear as a bell.” She laughed, clear as music, and hugged her head to her knees, blushing at her own vulgarity. “It was real quiet for a long time, and then they just went right on, as though nothing had happened. Who would have said that?”
Charlie laughed, too, and sat beside her on the porch, and he said to her, “Helen Trent, marry me.”
She stopped laughing. She looked at him for a long, long time. “I can’t marry you. I don’t want to be dashed against the rocks of despair.”
Charlie pulled away and stood up.
“This is real life, Sylvan, not some radio show. Did you hear what I said? I said, ‘Marry me, Sylvan Glass.’ ”
They stayed that way, staring at each other a long time.
“Then maybe you should ask me again. Some other time. Maybe you should ask me a hundred times, the way Gil has asked Helen. He knows it’s hopeless, but he asks her. He always has faith. You should, too. Please, just not now.”
Charlie turned away, watched the boy playing in the yard. Sylvan tugged on his pants leg. He looked down as she spoke, “ ‘Now, for Christ’s sake, just lay the dame and get it over with.’ ”
He laughed, a short, harsh laugh. “I love you, Sylvan, in case you didn’t know. In case you hadn’t noticed by some chance.”
“I’m nothing so great.”
“No, sweetheart. You are. You’re wonderful. You’re wonderful to me. A wonderful girl. To me, Sylvan.”
And he showed her how he felt, again and again, and it never seemed enough to him. His words never got to the heart of what he felt in his whole body, exploding inside her. Next to that, he had so little way to tell her, his words seemed small and imprecise and mute. He never worried about getting her pregnant. He hoped sometimes that it would happen. Then it would be over, or then it would begin. Then maybe this ache would go away.
If she touched him by accident as they were walking along, or sitting next to each other in the car, even so much as the tip of her little finger against his as he shifted gears, he felt an electric shock. And then a calm like he’d never known, a complete peace, knowing that this woman had touched him, even accidentally. Such a gift, this girl. What a wonder.
He tried to show her, to make her believe, and he couldn’t. It was never enough. So he gave her things. He couldn’t give her anything that would be visible or noticeable to Boaty, like a necklace or a silk scarf, couldn’t give anything that would have to be explained, and so he gave her what he had. He gave her land.
First, there was the house, Pickfair. Then there were two others. Then there were five farms. He gave them to her with a free hand, in secret. With every deed, his love for her deepened, and his hope expanded. She was no longer a hillbilly nobody from nowhere, sold quickly to the first bidder. She was a woman of property. She owned things. He tried and tried to explain it to her. She could, one day, he said, be free.
Every time he gave away one of the parcels of his land, he felt more owned, as though he had given her another piece of himself, of his heart, of his body. He was enraptured by her entitlement. In love with her ownership of what was his. It enhanced his affections, as the landscape of her body became more and more featured, particular, dotted with waterfalls and ravines and pine groves and a white house in the woods.
He hoped she would leave her husband. He hoped that more and more as each deed was signed. There was no longer any reason for her to stay with him, not that he knew of, and Charlie found it hard to accept her reluctance, her refusal.
“We’ll see” was all she would say. “We’ll see.”
Summer deepened, and still he waited. She was young. She was uncertain of herself. All that would change, he knew. He hoped it would.
Her reluctance aroused him even more, to greater and stronger acts of dominion and submission. Intoxicating, but useless and hopeless, in the end. She lay with him, and he knew he could posses her but never own her. Like a fish in a bowl, she darted this way and that, unknowable, wholly created from her own imagination and the images she watched flickering on the screen, platinum and ebony. Her moods changed like the clouds over the Blue Ridge, and sudden gusts of weather would come across her, chilling or warming their conversation, their lovemaking, but that made no difference to him. Now that he had asked her, told her what his intentions were, he wanted to feel the rush to the conclusion, to consummation. But she ran from freezing to feverish, showing nothing. Her darkening cold was as heated to him as her sudden, inexplicable, and luminous fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY
CLAUDIE, GO TO the movies with me.”
“Why’d I want to do that for, girl?” The black woman gathered the sky-blue linen in her fingers, took a straight pin from a cloth strawberry strapped to her wrist, and pinned down the pleats at Sylvan’s hip. It was a new season, and Sylvan had seen new things in the magazines, so they’d gone to Staunton and bought bolts of cloth to make her wardrobe all over again. She was being created like a Hollywood starlet, pleat by pleat. She was a creature of fantasy in a small town in the middle of nowhere that knew too much of how hard reality really was, a town that looked on her and her strange friendship with this odd black woman with a mixture of amusement and violent hatred. Their friendship—there was nothing else like it around. The blacks were there for a reason. Friendship wasn’t it.
“Moving pictures are a great thing. They’re everything it isn’t around here. They’re beautiful beautiful. They make you laugh even if you’re blue. Everything is different, all the time. And the people, they’re so beautiful.”
Claudie knew, because Claudie knew everything, exactly who Sylvan was, who her people were, and she knew that friendship with a white woman was a thing that wasn’t supposed to be. It just didn’t happen. But, like most of the things she didn’t care about, which was pretty much everything except her daughter, she didn’t care about that, either. She liked the hillbilly girl. Sylvan didn’t talk fancy around her, she knew better, so, when she talked to Claudie, you could still hear the lonesomeness of her girlhood in the valley, out there.
Like all white women, Sylvan asked too many questions, as though there were things she thought she had a right to know, even though they weren’t any of her business. White people thought black people didn’t have lives and business of their own, and maybe that was true for most. But Claudie Wiley didn’t belong to anybody, and never had, and never would.
“Where’s your little girl?”
“Up the stairs, where she always is.” Nobody ever went upstairs, beyond the room where Claudie sewed. Not everybody even got that far. If Claudie didn’t feel like answering the door’s knock, she just peeked out of the curtain and ignored it.
“Don’t she ever go out? I never seen her anywhere.”
“She doesn’t go out. Not for years.”
“Why?”
“It makes her kind of shy to go out on the street. She’s grown already. It’s her decision. Not one friend in the world. They laughed at her and she don’t want to mess with them any more. There’s reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“If you knew her, you’d know the reasons.”
“People say she’s . . . she’s . . .”
“I know what them people say.”
“It must be hard having a daughter like that.”
“Like what?” Claudie was getting shaper and stonier with every word.
“Like people say she is. Not right.”
“She’s fine. People talk too much. We have a life. It’s fine. We don’t care about them people.”
“What’s her name?”
“Evelyn. Evelyn Hope Wiley.”
“Who’s her father? Where is he?”
Claudie shot her a look that stopped conversation. A hard look. She sewed for a while, and at least the girl knew e
nough to say nothing while Claudie’s fingers flew in and out of the linen around her hips.
Finally she spoke, a mouth full of pins.
“He was just a boy. He had a way about him, yes, he did. I didn’t want to, I told him no, but he had a way. He was handsome and smart. I have to say that. He was the first. I didn’t tell nobody till I got to the point where something had to be said, and, even then, I wouldn’t tell his name. He got killed in the war. His name was Lomax. Nineteen. He didn’t even know he had a baby.”
She sewed. “You want to see her? Would that end this conversation??”
“I’d love to meet her.”
Claudie looked at her with pure hatred. She got up and went to the bottom of the stairs and called out, softly, “Evelyn Hope? Mama needs you. Would you come downstairs?”
Then she turned and stared hard at Sylvan as they listened to the footsteps on the stairs, slow, light. “She ain’t no circus animal, you know.”
More footsteps, and then there she was.
She was tall, taller than Claudie, and slender and pretty. And she was white.
“Say hello to Mrs. Glass, Evelyn Hope.”
“Hello, ma’am,” the girl said. “How are you today?”
“I’m fine, Evelyn Hope,” said Sylvan. “It’s lovely to meet you. You’re a lovely girl. You must be very happy.”
“I’m fine,” said the girl. “Mama? Did you need me for something?”
“I always need you, child. But not now. You can go back upstairs, honey. I’ll come up soon.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Evelyn Hope, and she curtsied to Sylvan who, absurdly, curtsied back. Then she retreated into the shadows and up the stairs.