A Summer of Kings

by Han Nolan

  It was King-Roy.

  I sat up and got myself arranged in the flat of the branch, brushed my bangs out of my face, tucked my hair behind my ears, and wiped at my eyes.

  King-Roy walked through the grass as though he were afraid of stepping on flowers or ants or some other delicate thing. He took his time getting to the tree, and when he got there, he didn't look up and try to find me. Instead he turned around and leaned his back against the trunk and stood there with his arms folded. I looked down at the top of his dark head and waited for him to speak. I waited and waited. Finally, when I had given up and had decided that he didn't even know I was there but had just come to spend the time of day standing beneath the tree, he spoke.

  He said, "They sent me out here to talk to you."

  I swung my legs. "Who sent you out?"

  "Your parents. They want me to get you to come on down out of that tree."

  "I'm mad at them. I'm mad at everybody. That's why I'm up here."

  King-Roy used his back to push off the tree an inch or two, then he fell back against it and nodded.

  "Stewart said I got you in big trouble. He said this is all my fault."

  I lifted my right leg up to the branch and grabbed it around the knee, letting the other leg dangle on its own. "I don't want to talk about it," I said. "I don't even want to think about yesterday."

  "Then what do you want to talk about?" King-Roy asked.

  I thought a second, then said, "Tree houses. I wish I had me a tree house. You ever had a tree house, King-Roy?"

  "No. What you want a tree house for, anyway; tree houses are for little boys."

  I shrugged and set my chin on my knee. "So why did you come back here, anyways?"

  King-Roy pushed off the tree again, only this time he didn't fall back against it. He turned around and looked at me.

  I sprang up, grabbing the branch above me, and stood looking down on him. I was nervous all of a sudden seeing his face again. His eyes looked sad behind his glasses. His eyelids looked heavy, as though they were too heavy for him to hold open all the way. He looked away and leaned sideways against the tree and said, "Your mother called my momma and told her where I was, and then I called home last night just to say hey, and Momma got on me and told me to get on back out to y'alls' house and stay put till the end of the summer."

  "How come she wants you here so badly?" I asked.

  "She wants me safe. She doesn't want me to get myself into any more trouble," King-Roy said.

  "So ... so, you're not here 'cause you want to be."

  "No," King-Roy said, shaking his head.

  I sighed and wished I had a pebble or something to throw at his head. "So you still like Yvonne, then, I guess."

  King-Roy looked up into the tree at me. "Course I like Yvonne; why shouldn't I?"

  I shrugged and pulled apart a leaf I had picked. "I guess you like girls hanging all over you like that. You like flirty girls." I tore at the leaf some more.

  King-Roy dropped his head and said, "I don't want to talk about that with you."

  "Why not?" I asked, letting the shredded leaf fall down on his head.

  He brushed the leaf bits off and said, "I just told you I'm not talking to you about that."

  I pulled at another leaf. "Okay, King-Roy, okay, but it's just—it's just that I thought you liked me."

  King-Roy pushed off the tree and looked up at me. "I do like you, Esther, but you tell me, what you think is ever gon' come of that, huh?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Well I'll tell you. Nothin'."

  I reached my arms over the branch in front of my chest and leaned forward to look down on King-Roy. "Because you're black and I'm white and you don't like white people?"

  King-Roy dropped his gaze and didn't answer me.

  I crouched and climbed down to the next limb, a limb closer to King-Roy. "You know what I wish?" I asked him. "I wish there was no such thing as black and white. Why were we made different colors, anyway? What's the point of that?" I climbed down to the next branch and sat.

  King-Roy said, "I don't know, but I'll tell you what I wish. I wish I had my own life. I wish I could be a man, a real man who wasn't afraid of anything."

  "What are you afraid of, King-Roy?" I slid myself down to the lowest branch and swung my legs above King-Roy's head. I knew if he reached a hand up he could touch me.

  King-Roy shook his head. "You don't know, do you?"

  "Know what?"

  "You don't know what it's like for a black man. I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid I'm gon' sit in the wrong place or drink from the wrong cup or look at the wrong person or touch the wrong thing. Alls I got to do is look wrong at something and I'll find myself with a noose around my neck."

  I nodded. "I guess everybody's scared of something."

  King-Roy made a face up at me like he didn't believe what I had just said. "Now, what you got to be afraid of?" he asked me.

  I pointed my toes and tried to touch his face with my feet. I thought about his question for a minute, and then I said, "I guess, King-Roy, I guess I'm scared I'm always going to like tree houses."

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When King-Roy asked me if I planned to stay up in the tree all day, I told him that I would come down only if he promised not to laugh at me.

  "Now, why would I laugh at you?" King-Roy asked.

  "Just promise me you won't laugh," I said. "Don't even look at me, okay?"

  "I'm looking at you right now and I see nothing funny."

  "That's because I'm sitting down."

  "Esther, are you coming out of that tree or not?"

  "All right," I said. I straddled the branch, locked my knees and swung myself around it, then dropped to the grass.

  King-Roy crouched down to help me stand, holding me by the waist. We stood back up together. I looked into his eyes and I saw a light in them, the light of laughter just about to break out, and I shouted, "King-Roy, you promised!"

  King-Roy let go of me, stood back for a better look, then burst out with a donkey laugh, and I couldn't help myself; I laughed, too.

  He slapped his thigh and pointed at me and said, "Esther, girl, what you got on?"

  I laughed and said, "You like it? I wore it just for you." I put one hand on my hip and one on the back of my head and sashayed around. "I bet Yvonne never looked so good."

  King-Roy laughed up some more donkey brays and said, "Sure 'nuff, you're an original, Esther. You're one hundred percent original."

  I stopped sashaying and looked at King-Roy, and I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Being an original sounded like a good thing, but living an original life, I had begun to realize, was a lonely, left-behind kind of life.

  King-Roy saw that I had stopped laughing, and he stopped, too, saying, "Whew," and wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes.

  I wanted to change the subject and think about something happy, so I asked him, "King-Roy, are you really ever going to teach me how to tap?"

  We started walking across the lawn toward the house and King-Roy nodded and said, "All right. We'll start tonight, how 'bout that?"

  I smiled. "That sounds perfect."

  When we got inside the house, Mother was waiting for me and she said, "King-Roy, if you don't mind, I'd like to speak to Esther alone for a minute."

  King-Roy nodded and headed upstairs and I followed my mother into the living room, where she had Andy Williams playing on the record player. He was singing "Moon River" and we had come in just as he was singing the line, "Two drifters off to see the world..." I wanted more than anything to join those drifters if it meant avoiding another confrontation with Mother, but I sat down next to her on the sofa and waited for what she was about to say.

  Mother had on her cream-colored dress with the short little jacket, and I thought how smart and pretty she always looked. I marveled at how she never looked hot, no matter how warm it got outside. I brushed my own damp bangs out of my eyes and stared down at her pretty pink-painted fi
ngernails and listened while Mother told me how important it was that she be by Madeline's side that next week.

  "She's going back into the hospital on Monday, Esther, and I need to be there to help her, so I see this strike nonsense of yours as a very selfish and defiant act at Madeline's expense. She has no one else, no husband or children to care for her."

  I looked down at my own grubby nails, dirty with tree bark, and said, "All I want is a little thanks now and again, a little show of appreciation. All I want is for everybody to stop picking on me."

  I looked up at Mother. Her eyes flashed at me angrily, and she asked, "Did you thank me for today's lunch?"

  "No," I said.

  "Did you thank me for ironing your shirts last week?"

  "No."

  "Do you ever thank me when you're home sick and I take care of you?"

  "Well, I hope I do, but I guess I don't or you wouldn't be asking me," I said.

  "The answer," my mother said, "is no, you do not. No one thanks me for driving them to the train station or picking up laundry or buying the groceries or cooking dinner or any of the other million and one things I do around this large household. Even with Daisy coming two times a week to help out, that still leaves me with too much to do, and do I ever get thanked?" Mother asked. She pinched her lips together and stared at me.

  I touched her pretty hand. "Mother, thanks for all of those things."

  Mother withdrew her hands. "I wasn't asking for thanks, Esther," she said with irritation. "I was just demonstrating to you that being a mother and a housewife is a thankless job, so you might as well get used to it because it doesn't get any better."

  I set my hand back in my lap and said, "So you mean you don't ever thank me because no one thanks you? Like a payback? Is it like that, Mother, a payback?"

  Mother stood up and shook with frustration. "Esther, no, it is not a payback. Honestly, how you could misunderstand what I'm saying, I don't know. I'm saying," Mother let out her breath, "I'm saying, that someday you, too, will be a wife and mother and no one is going to thank you for all the little things you do for them so there is no use going on strike over the fact that someone didn't thank you. What if I went on strike? How would that be? Would you tell me that? This whole household would come to a standstill."

  While Mother was speaking she had begun to pace with her arms folded in front of her, and her pretty cream pumps left small heel dents in the oriental carpet.

  I watched her walk back and forth, and when she came to a stop in front of me, after announcing how the whole house would come to a standstill, I said, "Mother, from now on I'm going to make sure I thank you for everything. Thank you even for this talk. Thank you for lunch and for bringing me soup when I'm sick and for taking me to school when I've missed the bus and for doing my laundry, and from now on, I'm just going to remember to thank you."

  Mother stood there blinking at me, and I couldn't tell if she was irritated with me still or what, but she couldn't seem to get anything to come out of her mouth except some sputtering sounds, so I added, "And I'll take Sophia to her rehearsals this week if you'll thank me, too, when we get back home."

  I could see by the red blotches moving up Mother's neck that this was the wrong thing to say, so I jumped up from my seat and said over Andy Williams's rendition of "Three Coins in a Fountain," "You don't have to thank me. I just thought you could, or you might, or ... or, something. So ... so, thanks for the talk, Mother, and I'll go now."

  The record had ended and was starting over again when I scurried out of the room. I had reached the first landing on the stairs when I heard Andy Williams sing out, "Love is a many splendored thing," and I remembered Pip and how he had said that love was not something that you planned like a road trip, but an affair of the heart, and I thought it must be so, because how else could I explain my love for my mother.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  That next week, I took Sophia to her rehearsals, got her settled backstage, and then I took Stewart to his ballet lessons. I hadn't spoken to my parents about Stewart and ballet because my father was out of town all that week, and it never seemed to be the right time to talk about it with Mother. She had enough to worry about with her sick friend, Madeline. She came home in the late afternoons looking so tired and hot—for once in her life she looked hot—it worried me. I did my best to help her out by getting some kind of canned or TV dinner on the table on the days when Daisy didn't come, and I cleaned up afterward, with Auntie Pie's help, and I kept quiet about the lessons. I figured my parents would realize Stewart was taking the ballet lessons when they got the bill for them, but Stewart said Mother and Dad had never said anything to him about any other bill, and he had been sneaking off for lessons whenever he could.

  "Maybe since Mother's on the board, they don't charge for the lessons," Stewart had said to me when we discussed it. "Maybe since they donate so much money to the ballet company, they don't send a bill. Do you think that's possible?" he asked.

  I guessed that it was, since my parents hadn't ever spoken to him about the extra lessons. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to let Stewart go, as long as he let me take him to the door of the studio and waited for me to pick him up again in the afternoon.

  I had never seen Stewart happier than during that week and over the next few weeks, and it was good to see that at least one of us was happy. He came out of the studio each afternoon smiling, his curly blond head bobbing up and down as he pranced along the city sidewalks. He laughed easily and enjoyed teasing Sophia out of her moods, and he helped me any way that he could, and I, remembering my talk with my mother, thanked him for his help.

  The high spot in my day, however, came in the evenings when I had my tap lessons with King-Roy.

  King-Roy had gotten a job down the street at the college. He worked days in the cafeteria kitchen as part of the cleanup crew, and he had to wear a hairnet over his head like a woman, so that his hair wouldn't accidentally fall out of his head and drop into a soup or a salad or some other dish sitting around in the kitchen. He said none of the white men working in the back had to wear one, just the Negroes, and he said this with a bitterness in his voice that I hadn't heard before.

  I took my lessons in the ballroom, where King-Roy and I stood sometimes side by side; sometimes with him in front of me, demonstrating a step; and sometimes facing each other. King-Roy started me out with simple flap steps and brush-ball steps, which he made me do a thousand times until I could make the step small and light and quick instead of big and clumsy. I never knew there was so much to just tapping my feet. I had to work to keep my balance while I stood on one foot and flapped the other one over and over and I had to remember to watch my hands so that they didn't freeze into clawlike positions while I concentrated on my simple footwork. In a way, it was like taking ballet classes, only the steps were freer and looser and more comfortable to do.

  King-Roy always acted patient with me that first week of lessons, and he seemed pleased with me, too. He seemed pleased that I was so eager to learn the steps, and pleased that I never complained when he made me do the same fl-ap, fl-ap, fl-ap, over and over. I could see his pleasure in his eyes, the way they twinkled when he watched me, and one time when I lost my balance, he caught me when he didn't have to. I wasn't going to fall on the floor, but he caught me, anyway, and he held me a few seconds, without saying anything, until it felt awkward for both of us and he moved away and didn't look me in the eyes the rest of that lesson.

  Each night, when the lesson was over, King-Roy would dance for me. I had brought my record player out into the ballroom and we put on one of my father's jazz albums and King-Roy danced.

  I had never in my life, not even at the movies or in the theater, seen such fancy dancing as the tap dancing King-Roy could do. He used the whole ballroom, traveling from one end to the other, or traveling in a circle, jumping up onto the window seats and twirling off again. He tapped and turned and leaped and kicked, and the whole time he looked as if he were skating on ice, the wa
y he glided over the floor. He could do a step on one foot that tapped a thousand taps a minute; that's what it looked like. It was as if his foot wasn't even part of his body. It was like a machine, like a jackhammer. I could sit on the window seat and watch King-Roy and his beaming face dance all night.

  I said to him once after he finished all breathless in the center of the room that he looked different when he danced.

  "How do I look different?" he asked me, taking a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiping off the sweat.

  "I guess," I said, walking over to him, "you look more like you, somehow. Do you know? More like who you're supposed to be. Like you're this complete, happy person. It's like that saying, 'God's in his heaven and all is right with the world.' You look like that when you dance," I said.

  That week was the best week we had had together all summer. Just spending the extra time together made me feel closer to King-Roy. He seemed more relaxed and happy, dancing and laughing with me, than I had ever seen him, and I tried my best to push my own anxieties about feeling left behind and about King-Roy someday leaving us out of my mind.

  Sometimes at night, after our lesson, King-Roy would get a telephone call from Ax. I always knew it was Ax because right away King-Roy would have this guilty look on his face and he'd turn his back on me to speak. I felt jealous of those calls because afterward, when King-Roy hung up the phone, he would become so quiet and subdued, he didn't want to talk with me anymore. He'd head off toward his room, saying, "I got me some reading to do," and I'd watch the back of him retreat up the steps, with his hand gripping the banister as though it were supporting his whole tensed-up body.

  King-Roy wasn't the only one doing some reading. I had lots of time on my hands while I waited down at the theater during Sophia's rehearsals, so I either stared at the one-sentence play I had written for Monsieur Vichy, trying to figure out how to at least make it into a two-sentence play, or I worried about how I was going to catch up with the rest of the world, or I read.