If that last thrust got him, he never showed it. He said: “I’m not going to ask her to subject herself to it. She’s got to choose for herself. But first I want to ask you something. I want you to take a good look at me. Here I am, Henry Bates, healthy, strong, educated, twenty-three years old. I know who my father and grandfather are, and my father knows who his grandfather was. I admit to meeting with a few inconveniences in American life . . . they might easily become huge inconveniences, terrible ones.
“But so far as I, Henry Bates, am concerned, I feel myself inferior to no man. That’s my final word and I’ll stick to it. . . . May I ask you, Mrs. Cary, if in the face of all that you still object to me for a son-in-law?”
“I certainly do,” she told him. She hated his assurance. She tried to batter it down. “I’d rather see her married to one of these Portuguese down on the Cape in the cranberry bogs. I’d rather see her dead!”
Under his bronze skin he was ashen. “There doesn’t seem to me any doubt about your opinion,” he said quietly. He turned to her daughter: “Well, Teresa, how do you feel about it?”
“You know how I feel,” she told him simply. . . . “But, Henry, perhaps there is something to Mother’s point of view.” She was surprised herself at the words issuing from her lips. . . . “I was thinking, I was wondering . . . your Spanish, you know. Couldn’t you use it most of the time and . . . and pass for a Mexican? In that way we could avoid most inconveniences. . . .”
He caught up his hat from the table. “Are you crazy, both of you? I’m perfectly satisfied to be an American Negro, tough as it all is. I can help other men to work their way to better conditions. What am I going to do, throw aside all my traditions, all my old friends and be a damned gringo just to satisfy the vanity of two make-believe white women! . . .
“You know, Teresa, if I’d had any idea you were interested in passing I’d never have looked at you in the first place!”
Picking up his heavy bag he was out of the room and down the steps. Teresa tried to run after him but David held her arm. Even then she broke loose and ran madly down the street to the corner. But he was gone. . . . Janet and David brought her back; Janet with her own hands mailed her heart-broken letter. . . . Later the stricken girl wrote to Alicia. But from neither of them did she receive a word.
CHAPTER XI
AFTERWARDS everything moved in a whirl. Her mother packed, bought tickets, cancelled one or two trifling engagements. In her fearful energy she was like a maenad. By morning they were in Philadelphia and Teresa was in her own room in her own bed. . . .
Instead of being in some New England hotel in Henry’s arms, as for two weary years they had planned, she was home . . . nowhere, with life broken off short, with years of emptiness stretching before her or with new plans, new hopes to devise again.
Oliver, as heart-broken as she, came to comfort her. As young as he was he had dreamed dreams about and within the new life which Teresa had promised to build for him. He could not understand how anyone loving his sister, knowing her, could have been willing to leave her. . . . She was afraid to acquaint him with the whole sorry tale . . . afraid of what it might reveal to him of his mother’s ruthlessness, of her terrible obsession; of the insight it might give him of her attitude toward himself.
Her father was sorry for her, but hurt that she had not given him her confidence. “Perhaps if you had let me know, dear, I could have directed you. . . . I could have taken off the worst edges. . . . From what you tell me about him he must have been a very fine fellow. But he had the egotism of a boy of his virtues and your mother’s scorn and your own willingness to quibble, pricked him like a knife. From what you say he had plenty of friends of both races willing to take him at face value . . . think then how it hurt him to have two people of his very own group to tell him: ‘You’d be all right if it weren’t for your skin; you’d be just the fellow if you were only a Mexican. . . .’”
“But, Dad, I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t change him one bit. It was only that Mother took me so off my feet. I was thinking maybe I could make matters easier for both of them. . . .”
He sighed heavily. “I don’t know what there is about color. I only know you can’t discuss it or make rules for it, especially among people of mixed blood in America. . . . It’s easier, I believe, in the Tropics and in South America. . . . I know many a time I’ve wished I were perfectly black . . . though, like you, I think your Henry’s type the most attractive that the world produces. . . .” He sighed again, thinking of some lovely creatures, all bronze and gold and fire, whom he had met in his youth.
Christopher came in and said, “Tough luck, kid!” But no one, he informed her, was worth a broken heart. “Plenty of other fish in the sea . . . just don’t let Mother catch on next time. . . . Play your cards better. For further directions come to your big brother Chris . . . et cet., et cet.”
As though anything that anyone said could make a real difference! As though anything could alleviate the fact that her hope, her lode-star, her rock, to change the figure, on which she had built the temple of her whole future had been torn away! . . .
Where other girls had chosen a profession, a calling which should absorb their interest, which would always afford them a shelter in a time of stress and storm, she had banked her all on making a home for herself and Henry and Oliver, a home in which she could be real and from which she could by example, even more than precept, make clear what her attitude was to be on a certain moot question.
She remembered how she had meant to relate to Henry, with laughter and perhaps some tears, all her adventures in this nebulous world of near whiteness. How she had hated it, how it had shut out the expression of her true self. She had meant to make clear to him how infinitely she preferred his world, which for all of its limitations imposed from without was yet a free one within. . . . While hers in spite of the eternal advantages, to which Olivia was always referring, was within a very morass of secrecy, of deceit.
Yet whom could her deception really harm? No one actually, physically, for after all white was white. And there was no difference between her and the thousands of white girls with whom now she had associated for years except the expected differences in shading and coloring. . . .
Her brain, working with pitiless and untiring clarity and velocity, kept revolving about that last encounter with Henry; how up until almost the last moment it never occurred to her to modify, in his presence at least, her clear desire to be known frankly and without reserve as a person of mixed blood. But at that second when it all meant so much she had been willing to temporize; she who had never before thought of introducing a foreign element had begun to talk about “passing for Mexicans.”
Or rather about Henry’s passing, because for herself she was still as unrecognizably white as ever. It was as though she had said to Henry in a phrase which she had read in one of DuBois’ flaming essays: “My poor unwhite thing!” If he could chalk over, conceal, explain away that lack of whiteness he too would be acceptable in that holy of holies which she and her kind were elected by foreordination to inhabit.
Something had given way within her. Something had betrayed her. Her mind plunging on and on, reviewing the situation through its thousands of cells, fastened on her last talk with Jarvis Seely; his scorn, his contempt when he spoke of Henry, the manner of his branding because of Henry’s brown skin. . . .
That was what had done it, that was what had fashioned a breach in the wall which her own instinctive racial loyalty had tried to set up against the ever encroaching sea of her mother’s protestations and revolt. And after all the wall had not been strong enough.
It had fallen before the first onslaught. And Henry had been hurt, not by her secrecy nor by her deception, which they would have been able to laugh away together after a few days of mutual confidence in their own home. No, he had been pierced, and to the quick, by the fact that she had, by her silly request, shown that she had considered him imperfect in the one respect which he was quite p
owerless fundamentally to change or even conceal.
As soon as her thoughts had reached this point they began all over again. . . . And try as she would she could meet with no relief. . . . Finally her whirling mind carried her into a sort of delirium in which for a brief while she was mercifully unaware of her thoughts.
Her father, examining her with great anxiety before he called in a consultant, pronounced hers a case of old-fashioned brain-fever. . . . From this state she emerged wan and pale and meek, perpetually exhausted but without the hateful whirling in her brain. She was interested, however, in no one, in no thing. Only Oliver could bring to her face the slightest vestige of interest. It was as though something very deep within, something very fundamental, reminded her that she must not entirely fail her little brother.
Even Olivia finally awakened to some feeling of alarm. For a long time she had refused to give cognizance to Teresa’s condition. The entire situation involving Henry and her daughter was so foreign to anything her mind had ever conceived that she could not believe its effect on the young people to be anything but on the surface. Indeed if Teresa had not so visibly failed before her eyes she would have been able to dismiss the whole episode. . . . No, there was one thing to remember . . . that her daughter was no longer to be trusted.
With these two impressions in mind she did approach her husband with a plan. She would accompany her daughter, the following term, to Northampton, take a small apartment, if she could find one, and keep house for her. In view of the girl’s condition Dr. Cary acquiesced to this, though he did find himself wincing a bit at the prospect. . . . None knew better than he the heaviness of his wife’s hand when she dipped into the family purse. At this stage of her life she was as totally different from the sober economical young girl whom he had married as though she had undergone a complete metamorphosis.
Fortunately for him Teresa intervened here. She would not, she reiterated with all the strength of her weakness, return to college. No argument that her mother could produce sufficed to move her. All she needed to do was to close her eyes and recall those happy, happy days of anticipation and waiting. . . . There was not a path, scarcely a brick or a stone about Northampton which had not absorbed something of her blissful hopes. . . . The very atmosphere would speak to her of Henry. . . .
Lying wanly on her pillows she reviewed her tortured, wasted young existence. For twenty-one years, almost a third of her allotted span, she had yielded to her mother’s obsession. She would probably yield again . . . for the breakdown in her resistance showed her clearly how completely her inner self was under her mother’s domination. . . . But this, this she would not endure. She would never go back to college.
“Daddy,” she told him, “I realize what a frightful expense I have always been to you and how completely I must have disappointed you. . . . As soon as I am really well I’ll enter training-school here. . . . There’s no reason why I shouldn’t teach. I believe I’d like it. . . . But if you send me off to Northampton . . . or even to any other school, I’ll die.”
What she was really trying to tell him was that she would never again be placed under the strain to which Olivia had so unrelentingly exposed her. She was sick, with a deathly sickness, of her sorry rôle. In her weakness she had discovered a new weapon. She might easily, she felt, lie there and will herself to a perpetual invalidism. . . . She would do it too if she could not have her way.
Her father of course yielded immediately. He was glad to have his daughter home, this dear, soft, tender creature, to whom he was always welcome. In the morning before he went on his rounds hers was the last room he visited; on his return he came rushing up to her with a book, a paper, a posy.
He discussed his cases with her; he planned the details of his annual hunting trip . . . for he rather fancied himself in the rôle of Nimrod. She found out about his pet charities, little indulgences in kindlinesses which neither she nor Chris had ever suspected. Little indulgences which, she began to suspect, her own constantly mounting expensiveness had sadly curtailed.
Her brothers were delighted. Christopher in these few months spent more time home than he had in the whole expanse of the past three years. Teresa came to know all his innermost thoughts. Dear Chris! He was passing through his particular purgatory too. Long since, of course, he had thrown off the yoke of his mother’s dominance. . . . Rarely did he bring colored boys to the house. But by the simple expedient of telling the truth and by following up his own predilections he made himself welcome in the home of anybody whom he elected to call friend. . . .
Occasionally on a Friday or Sunday evening he was host to a small group of fellows banded together through some bond, scholastic or sporting. But as the group was composed of members of various races, there was no occasion for deception there. Teresa admired his forthrightness; he possessed, it was true, his father’s backing, but even without it, he would have acted no otherwise. He did not, he told Teresa firmly, intend to have his life all cluttered up with a lot of silly deceits and subterfuges.
“If you’d had any grit, you’d have shaken clear of all her old silly ideas too.”
She never resented his frankness, knowing what prompted his occasional outbursts of irritation. Christopher’s natural inclination to remain within his own racial group, strong as it was, had been bolstered still more completely by his liking for Marise. How or when this had started, she could not tell. Only a little while ago, it seemed to her, they had all been children together; teasing, criticising, alternately ignoring or seeking each other.
Chris, she especially remembered, had made a habit of speaking with a slight disparagement of Marise. Had it after all been feigned, his sister wondered? . . . Her mind went back to that farewell dance just before she had gone to Christie’s. As on a screen she saw again her brother dancing with Marise; her lithe sinuous figure, almost blotted out in his tense arms, his thatch of burnished hair drooping over her glorious, vital curls. . . . Afterwards they had danced the tango together. . . . Teresa had been so amazed for Christopher had never been considered adept at dancing. But with Marise he had whirled and stamped and postured. . . .
Whatever conditions in the past, she was in his blood now. He rarely saw her, Teresa knew, for she was still in New York. Her rare visits to Philadelphia were only for the sake of her mother between whom and herself there flourished that complete, perfect undemanding affection which exists occasionally between personalities, totally different. . . .
She never wrote him letters, only cards with the barest information in her big careless, sprawling hand. . . . “The show is really a success. . . .” “Sorry I missed you. . . .” “Home tomorrow for a few hours.”
Teresa could always tell when the boy had received one of these scanty missives. “You see she must care for me, Tess, or she wouldn’t take time to send me even this, busy as she is.” And he would fall to scanning the card anew, to see if he could discern on its chilly surface one word which could be construed into regard or even esteem.
Teresa wondered a little sadly if the Cary children were doomed to disappointment in this vital longing for love.
She was glad Oliver was too undeveloped in years and disposition to be involved in such matters. . . . He was so happy these days; just to be in her presence brought him supreme felicity.
Once thinking idly on the happy days which she had planned for him and Henry together, she awoke to the realization that half of her dream had come true. She was at least making a home for Oliver. And no amount of native modesty could keep her from acknowledging to herself the constant solace which she was affording her father and older brother. The thought dissipated some of the soreness in her heart. Gradually by a signal effort each day she thrust the memory of Henry behind her. Life was pretty good. And at least there was still the future.
CHAPTER XII
DURING all this time Olivia withheld her hand. Checkmated she was by her daughter’s illness, but thwarted, worsted, never. In this pursuit, indeed in any pursuit to which
she might have set her hand, she never once thought of the word defeat. . . . It was simply not in her vocabulary. . . . Teresa had almost eluded her, but the fact remained that she had not. Just the fact was sufficient for Olivia. The nearness of failure; its touch and go quality never entered her mind. Out of the whole mass of happenings she realized only two things . . . first that Teresa was not to be trusted; secondly that she must make her tactics less obvious.
As always she went about her own activities. She attended her luncheons and teas, her committee meetings in hotel and parish house and the waste spaces of impersonal parlors of some rich woman whom lack of success in life at home had driven to a vaster, less demanding field outside. She continued to exchange telephone calls, notes and telegrams with women to whom she was known only as an active worker, a chairwoman of some particular subcommittee, a delegate who could always be counted upon to pay her own expenses. . . . And during all this time she said nothing about Phineas Burton, or the two young Amherst men from whom Teresa received an occasional note. Nor did she object when her daughter spirited Oliver away on the Saturday on which she had planned to have him in his white butler’s jacket serve tea to the five members of the sub-committee with whom she felt most closely allied.
She was not a clever woman but she could bide her time.
It was true that she preserved her usual aloofness to such few colored people as came to the house, but she had little trouble there. Teresa had literally associated only with Phebe and Marise and the latter with her tell-tale brownness was a hundred miles away. . . . In any event she would never have crossed the Cary doorsill, having without one spoken word analyzed even as a child Olivia’s complex.