The practical heart, p.34
The Practical Heart, page 34
“Get on out now, boy. You came hoping to find you’re bettern you are. But—son?—you didn’t deserve even him. Go back to Hell where you all came from. Any idea what you costs us? You ain’t a thing but white.”
V.
After my Falls reunion’s farewell banquet-dance, I watched a hundred matched-up classmates wander half plotzed to station wagons rigged with child-seats. They all moved, linked romantically arm in arm, maybe feeling, as I did at 2 a.m., about eighteen. Weren’t they destined, if ever again, to make love (foreplay and all) tonight?
I found myself alone. On foot, weaving thanks to drink, I was aware of being so richly unaccompanied, an “only-child” feeling like the only white child ever born to a black man, feeling “only,” aiming vague toward my downtown hotel (formerly the Bank).
I took my time. Nobody except the Pay-for-Play soft-core “Adult Channel” waited in Room 306. After two blocks, I thought I heard, just half a block behind me, springy footsteps, taps pinging the toes of shoes.—In the manner of noir movies, I kept stopping, a trick … to catch … the sounds … of someone tailing me. I convinced myself—with help from our reunion’s generic-brand gin—that the spiffy, almost tap-dance cadence in arrears of me must mean my own departed father’s resurrected steps.
Caught up in a drama only partly self-invented, I dodged into the doorway of a defunct pawnshop. Scanning my recent route, I heard three more tentative footfalls slow then, coyly, halt. I saw absolutely no one.
Falls, like most small American towns, has gone all soft and moribund downtown. Everything alive’s leached westward toward the malls. Baby Africa, once homemade, unpainted, and organically pleasing as a set of mud daubers’ nests, now stands disfigured by low-cost cinder-block housing. Units uninterested in charm, incapable of coziness, as prisons are.
Now, a little drunk, feeling fully blessedly anonymous, I permitted myself the luxury of simply going with this, whatever—this pursuit. A bit of 2 a.m. staggering wouldn’t hurt a living soul. And if Clyde did stalk me, my show of willingness would surely draw him closer. That’s all I hoped. To lure him. Wouldn’t it help if he found his Bible copilot somewhat fallen? Me, all too mortal, fully grown, no longer the priggish teetotaling little boy Clyde had somehow decided to go ahead and love.
In such a heightened state, as I wandered past abandoned storefronts, they looked like 1840. I don’t know why—in the eerie orange glow from Falls’s new futuristic streetlamps—I noticed one particular window. But, breathless with the footsteps’ odd pursuit, a bit achy from tonight’s overly athletic rock-and-roll dancing meant to show everyone how hip and spry I’d remained, I pressed one hand against plate glass, steadying myself.
Here, displayed among bits of fallen pink fiberglass wool, still improbably vertical before a scrap of pegboard dropped from some lowered interior roof, one filthy figurine stood.
She yet wore a sling, a truss quite perfectly miniaturized. Wedged under one arm, the tiny oak crutch angled just so. Her neck brace looked squirrel-suitable. This small goddess’s temple had crumbled around her. But all the 1950s gear dedicated to keeping “Blanche” standing had somehow left her—these several decades later—miraculously upright. An inspiration still.
Thousands of days of sun had turned her pinky skin to a surface tan, then charbroiled gray, then on toward chalky black-brown. Her hair had once been painted yellow marcelled waves. That tone had whitened toward seeming some old, pallid rubber swimming cap. Her eyes cast upward with a long-suffering mulish patience. Blanche still helplessly presented herself—a devotional figure in this deserted yet monitoring little town.
And I—drunk from four atypical “what the hell” martinis, feeling overwhelmed with years of thwarted postponed sentiment, too aware of being back here and unhappily haunted two blocks from Janine’s former American Grill, not sure yet if I were technically a white man or a black one, as unwilling as my dad to surrender either option—now mashed both palms against Blanche’s greasy glass. With no kind woman waiting at the hotel, I was somehow going down before her. On my knees, on the sidewalk, I stooped before our poor, dear mascot—mercilessly immortal. No one now strolled Main. Not a car moved. No tricky footsteps sounded now.—This far from the two decent malls, who’d care, who’d notice me?
I knelt, in penance, mock-defeat. And yet, hands joined in some mimed prayer only half comic, I gazed up and in at her. I understood why Falls had given her that name. From the start, Blanche had stood right here in plain view, fading, blanching clear to the shade of tar.
And I let myself, sloshed, hoping unsuccessfully for Dad, practice—if silently—those actual Hebrew words the guy should use to eventually enter Paradise. Might not Clyde, on tiptoe nearby, overhear me? Shouldn’t he finally benefit from my education that’d cost him dearly? I mimed his passwords to a platinum doll our holy sun had worshiped for so many bright decades, it had loved her black.
I called through filthy glass, “Forgive us, Blanche.”
VI.
… no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church.
Ephesians 5:29
For longer than I can believe now, I’ve taught Latin, Greek, and literature. I’m presently Dean in Charge of Admissions at a fine undergraduate women’s college here in New Hampshire. My beautiful, somehow teenaged, daughters now spend more than half their college vacations with my ex-wife and her doctor husband. Preparing for those weeks when my girls turn up, I’ve rented a farmhouse, one big sunny bedroom for each of them. While my daughters are away at school or are staying at Bethany’s upstate, I can at least stroll into their quarters; I can sit on either ruffled four-poster, can look around at their pictures, their makeup, their stray sheet music. During such solitary Sunday afternoons, I feel (at least) the curator of the Small Museum to Deirdre and Sara. It is, incidentally, a Museum to Fatherhood. I feel close to my girls’ cultural claptrap, even their stash of female products large enough to stanch the Israeli Ladies Army Corps. Each colorful sock drawer reassures.
Like Clyde, when it came time to marry I fell in love with Beauty. As with him, it did not end happily. But maybe there’s been at least some minor class progression? I mean, Clyde Melvin Delman’s wife went after a cow doctor, whereas mine proved serially unfaithful with her own highly respected, world-renowned gynecologist. Small steps. Stirrups. Boot straps. Whatever.
Just prior to the divorce, Bethany, Deirdre and Sara, and I were headed south on that single requisite American middle-class trip to Disney World. Walt’s first park was called a “Land”; his second, “World”; Christ knows what’s next.
I didn’t want my daughters someday saying I’d been too much a penny-pinching egghead to have granted them this flashy, trashy experience. (I’m convinced the Disney organization trains schoolkids to perfect this tacit threat.) I checked the map. I found I could probably drive a leased car from Orlando to Boca. I said “Uh-oh” aloud.
My frustrating surprise meeting with Aunt Naomi, the sound of some phantom’s two-toned shoes, all these urged me on toward Grace Meadows of the Castalia Meadows clan. To judge from legwork, from my continuing detective fantasies, I struggled harder to find my black kin than to accept the white ones. If I now felt some duty toward my girls, there was also a long-standing embarrassment before my wife of fifteen years. Bethany had never once laid eyes on Grace. I might pretend to be some waif out of Dickens, but my natural mother did still live and breathe, if within arduous driving distance.
I remembered Doc Dix calling me “you little mongrel bastard.” True as that’d likely proved, I told my therapist (the seventh) that by shunning Mom I might be avoiding the single living, legitimate (or illegitimate) member of my small, short-lived tribe. In the end, I didn’t care to be known as a grievance lister and professional orphan.
Besides, by now, hadn’t some statute of limitations passed? Part of me, of course, still hoped Grace would turn up for our Florida meeting very drunk, half dressed, decidedly blowsy. My worst fear was—she wouldn’t! I longed to turn, at last, toward my real family, my smart wife and our bright, versatile girls, to say at last, “You see? What kind of person could’ve done such things, and to her only child?”
…
I understood how my lunging in on Grace, mid-act, April 15th, 1956, spread-eagle on that rose-patterned couch, an entrance singularly unexpected even after my breaking open the screen door—I knew how that at once reversed her own young life along with mine, and his. I knew I’d razed at least one vestibule of her long lifespan. Still, I could never quite forgive Grace’s “dropping me.” And at the ripe old age of eight. As an adult, as a teacher, as a parent myself, I still (monthly if not weekly, daily) find her behavior toward me perplexing and quietly, steadily damaging. It’s easy to say one should throw all such toxic cargo overboard. But actually doing that is something of a bitch.
Sure, I knew that being sent away to school had probably “been the making of me.” Would I otherwise have given myself so wholly to my kids, my serious teaching, my passionate if obscure scholarly pursuits? All this sprang from just such early abandonment. Even my undying tie with Clyde developed during our Sunday banishments, exits that her public love affair forced upon us. I’d been lucky, if not in my biology, then in at least my mentors…. So—shouldn’t I just go ahead at last and thank Grace Delman for whatever I had—even accidentally—achieved?
My wife forever urged me to phone “poor Grace.” At least to reciprocate Mom’s most recent birthday gift and Christmas card. “Meadows, she can’t be that bad.” I gave my cool thin history-major Bethany such a silent tantrum of a look. “I mean,” she tried to justify her goading, “she is your mother. No matter who your literal father was. If you ever bothered to carry anybody around for nine months slung directly over your bladder, you’d see how said carrier might expect that parcel to bother phoning her every three to four decades. You’re always telling your students how short human history really is. Well, the old crow won’t be alive forever. She was probably just a kid then. You lug it all around, Meadows. She didn’t directly kill your dad. You’re maybe afraid you did. But you’d probably prefer to blame her for another forty years. Here Endeth the Bethany Lesson. But, then, how many times before have you ignored my saying this?”
I gave my wife a single paint-blistering stare. Sullen, it said, “You, the by-product of orthodontia and dressage, you, grown up in total love, cannot know all I lost at eight.” I then walked direct into my study. I yanked out the envelope from Grace’s last, costly, gilded, tasteless Christmas card. I’d saved it, just in case.
Across the envelope’s upper left, a phone number had been jotted in red ink under the words: “New for now.” I calculated it’d been six months since Mother mailed this. So which had won? Grace’s “new” or her “now”?
After twenty power breaths, I dialed from the kitchen extension so Bethany might overhear. I wanted my darling nearby; she intuitively understood all this; she now decided to make coffee, though lately neither of us could safely drink caffeine after 3 p.m. I felt singularly lonely finally ringing up my mom. I calculated it’d been eighteen years since last I heard her voice.
As I took in extra oxygen before punching a final digit, the scent of fresh-ground coffee somehow helped. Bethany then swung a Jack Daniel’s and water before my face, ice clinking. Her rosy hand held it there, ringing like some baby Liberty Bell. (If she had not run off three months later to Oaxaca with her gynecologist after seven secret years of weekly checkups under him, I swear I’d still be with her.)
“Pelican Manor Marina. Larry from Security. What?”
I asked for Grace (had to turn over the envelope to learn the most recent of her married names). Doing so, being this jumpy, I spilled half the needed drink. My wife laughed behind me. Well, Larry said, he didn’t usually go and fetch owners, but this once he’d maybe go for Grace, since it was Grace, yeah, he’d drag off and bring her clear back here to the phone, he guessed, but this single time only, understood? And I’d just have to wait and pay the charges, no matter where I was calling from. “And someway, mister, you just sound long distance.”
“You have no idea,” I told this Larry. But he’d already set down the receiver. I now had time to picture him, then her. I imagined a blond-haired Grace, made up like Kim Novak in the second half of Vertigo, down by the seaside selling crab burgers. She’d be wearing some paper cap tipped at a sailorish angle, hawking burgers off a rolling dockside cart. Beneath her striped French patio umbrella, Grace would be flirting with half-nude surfer-boys my daughters’ age, and all while Grace tried to ignore the dozen pelicans gathered, barking, unmannerly, expecting handouts. Even among birdlife, word had leaked out: my mom was “easy.”
Behind me, Bethany hummed so I’d feel accompanied, filling dead phone airtime. I could plainly hear some Florida AM radio, one of those scary right-wing call-in shows. “Is it just me, Ed, or is the International Communist Jewish Media Banking Cartel gettin stronger every day, Ed? …” I was also privileged, during the six endless minutes I waited, to eavesdrop on snatches of three men’s listless conversation. They spoke of one mighty big fish, their catching it. Voices cracked, they sounded like old-timers. They debated whether they should have released their monster before the official photographer’s boat got to them. Some guy recalled how he’d brought on board one of those disposable yellow cameras, but it’d somehow plopped into his beer cooler and no pictures turned out and, wouldn’t you just know, the one time you really truly needed proof to win a goddamn trophy plus get on the six o’clock news!
“What?,” it was my wife, now miming interest, face to face across the kitchen counter. I gave her my eye-rolling, exasperated, Ollie Hardy, you-won’t-believe-this ask-me-later look. But I did appreciate her concern and hovering. Marriage has its moments; odd, I recall Bethany’s hanging around while I awaited Mom as one of our marriage’s finest.
“Welcome to the Nuthouse. Grace, Proprietor. Dennis, that you? Because everybody’s waiting on deck, still rumless. You fall in or what?” It was a woman’s voice but dropped an octave deeper than my own and considerably more porcelain-crackled. (I heard a full-fledged local “character.”)
She still sounded perky, oddly girlish, if several steps nearer bass. Had Grace finally taken up smoking? That’d been the only vice she’d missed.
“Dennis? Cat got your tongue? Or the pussy or what?” (I could hear old-timers yuk at this; I pictured Grace’s snappy collusive wink.) “And if you bring your usual cut-rate brand, you’re not gettin aboard. Meyer’s Dark or nothin, Dennie.”
“This is actually Meadows.” There came a pause. I resisted adding a last name; I resisted restating, out of respect for her time-battered neurons, my actual biological relation to this old whore.
Then I realized, after eighteen years, “Actually Meadows” might sound (especially to someone with the DTs and awaiting her rum) as illogical as “Pelican Manor.”
But Grace replied at once: “Well, ’ll be damned. An answered prayer for sure. And here I’m talkin m’ party talk. You finally followin the sun south, son?—Because, do. Because, this Buck has quite a boat.”
(Of any sentence in my life’s account, the last one, hers, verbatim, is my favorite, I must say. I’ll give the old girl that.)
“Grace, I actually was calling about maybe visiting. Given Disney World’s location and our girls’ ages, and my duty to get them there at least once before college, my family will soon be in your ‘neighb.’” I cringed at this locution. Plus, I’d also just said “actually” twice. I feared I sounded like the fussy Northeasterner I had perhaps become. Almost at once, the old woman’s voice said, “Great.” Then, maybe addressing the gathered fisherfolk so enjoying our phone reunion, she announced, “My long lost son’s comin!” Next Grace added what my wife later guessed to be a favorite Cajun French phrase meaning, “Let the good times roll.”
Bethany slid a pen before me. I jotted on the Christmas-card envelope. Mother provided surprisingly cogent directions from Orlando. She added how, on “the day of,” I’d need to summon her right to this gatehouse. I’d best use the name of Buck’s boat. Ordinarily I could phone it direct. But the last trip out, during a sort of party, their cell phone had fallen in, was a long story. But Larry here, see, Larry wouldn’t budge from using the boats’ names only. He couldn’t be bothered with lists of all those owner-occupants.
“Whatever,” I told my mother. “I’ve got my pen poised. What’s his boat called? Your boat.”
“You’ll laugh. Big professor and all like you. Promise you won’t laugh, no matter how stupid it’s gonna sound to a tweedy Princeton snob like you.”
“I didn’t go to Princeton. Or have you forgotten? Their silver-polishing scholarships had all been taken. Look …” I grew abruptly enraged. I stood up from my kitchen stool. Bethany, behind me, touched my upper back—not knowing what’d happened, and yet knowing—stroking my neck in the way one cunning, controlled human will try to soothe some stupid, volatile, and surging larger animal. I mean: here I’d tracked my mother down after years of abandonment, and she wouldn’t even tell me …
“Okay okay …,” she relented. “Sheesh. You never did have all that hot of a sense of humor, ya know? I seem to remember your timing also left little something to be desired. But ready to copy? Thing’s named: More Trouble Than It’s Worth II.—You all right with that?”
And she laughed, hard. She laughed until she coughed the way Clyde used to, sliding from forgetful mirth to overmindful mortality. And finding even that funny. I listened to her croupy cackling. I waited for her breath’s ballast to right itself.
I snorted at the name, then asked, “May I be mirthful?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” she said. “Been wishing for a little lightness out of you for absolute ages. Glad to hear some now. Guess you were just born serious. Never knew where you got that from….”
