Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  If he had been older he would have known enough to ask her: “What could be of more consequence than a little boy, particularly your own little boy?”

  One would have expected him with his delicate feelings to betake himself to his room for an orgy of tears and self-pity. But he had long since learned that no tears could wash away the anguish of the wounds which his mother knew so well to inflict. . . . Instead he put on his wind-breaker and walked over to Mrs. Davies. . . . He had not expected to see Marise, but amazingly she was home.

  She was blue, she told him, “But I won’t be blue anymore now that you’re here, Honey. You’re a sight for bad eyes.”

  Kissing him lightly on his forehead, she brushed back his curling, crisp hair, helped him off with his coat.

  “Look,” she said, watching intently his dejected countenance, “I couldn’t make up my mind whether to eat lunch first or to practice my dance-steps. Now that you’re here to help me to do both, you shall decide for me.”

  He told her, thinking shyly how grand she was and how he meant some day to marry someone just like her, that he thought it was better to lunch first.

  Her face cleared. “Just what I hoped you would say, Oliver. I’m so hungry. Would you like to watch me get things together?” She did not make the mistake of some horrible older people, always thinking that a boy was a machine to be sent immediately out on an errand. She did not even ask him to unscrew a stubborn lid from a pickle-jar.

  “I was so afraid,” she said, her beautiful hands working so nimbly, “that you might choose the music first . . . you’re such an artist.”

  He flushed and stammered. “Please don’t make fun of me, Marise.”

  She turned her lovely face toward him. He had never seen it more serious. “None of us could make fun of you, Oliver. . . . Everybody in Philadelphia, everybody that we know anyway, is waiting for you to do something great.”

  Abashed and happy he hid his confusion by eating large quantities of devilled eggs. But his eyes were bright and shining. . . . Afterwards she showed him the music for her dance, a rather intricate routine with an especially unusual accent. . . . He took it and read it through as someone else might read a manuscript, humming absently a phrase here and there. . . . He had the gift of absolute pitch. . . . Then he sat down and played it, his phrasing, his artistry, his perfect touch converting it into a thing of beauty.

  “It sounds so different when you play it!” Marise told him admiringly. Then with the same serious intentness which he had shown she began to rehearse. The room was large enough for him to be able to see her every gesture. . . . Presently, for the music was simply a repetition of three or four patterns, he was able to give her his undivided attention.

  “You’re simply grand, Marise,” he told her unenviously. “How do you think it would be if I were to play this part very rapidly, and the other very legato. . . . You’d get a chance to try a different step then, wouldn’t you?”

  He stayed there until the dusk fell and she was a little worried but she would not tell him to go. Her mother came in, however, and affectionately shooed him home.

  “Time for all boys your age to be thinking about lessons and bed. . . . Did Marise give you anything to eat?”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Davies.”

  “And you’ve been here helping her?”

  “I hope I’ve been helping her.”

  “And now you’re happy?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “Why, yes,” he said in surprise as though testing his feelings. “I believe I am.”

  “Well then, I’m going to tell you good-night.” She gave him a motherly hug and kiss. “And mind you stay happy.”

  He went off through the thin tingling November rain, loving them both for their sweet tactfulness.

  Slowly, thoughtfully Mrs. Davies mounted the stairs, stopping a moment before the sitting-room where her daughter sat at the piano, absently touching a key or two in the soft light.

  “Poor little tyke,” she said, “poor little tyke . . . ain’t he too pitiful? . . . I wish he was my little boy.”

  “I wish to goodness he was,” said Marise. She went over to a small desk and began to write a note to Christopher.

  Gradually as one who, in order to get rid of a distasteful object, hides it from sight, so Oliver, in sheer self-defense, began to hide from himself the consciousness of his mother’s distaste. In the morning he had breakfast with his father, who, this last year, had returned to his former practice of early office hours. . . .

  It was then time for school which he adored. . . . Philadelphia is in many respects unkind to her colored denizens but, except in the case of the more rabid moving-picture houses, Oliver never met with discrimination. . . . There was really something about him which transcended ordinary prejudice. . . . Like Marise in her school-days the boy was the favorite of both his teachers and classmates. There was no position in the miniature polity of the school which might not have been his for the asking.

  He learned too to refrain from seeking his mother on his return from school. Very often she was home, but unless their paths crossed directly he did not bid her even good-day. To his own gently inclined mind, this seemed at first a terrible breach, but she never seemed to notice it. . . . Sally, who loved him like a son, preferring him infinitely to the other children whom she had known much longer, prepared his lunch with more care and thoughtfulness than she arranged Mrs. Cary’s teas for her committee women. . . .

  After lunch there was his music . . . his grandfather had sent him the baby grand which was formerly installed in the house on Eleventh Street. The piano was in his room, a large one on the third floor. So he was able to practice at his ease. Then there were the long letters from Christopher and Teresa to be read and to be answered. Lovely tasks these. At six o’clock his father would come in from his last round and the exquisite evening would set in.

  He might, he knew it, have been infinitely worse off. And although never once did he in chagrin or bravado say that he did not care if he did not have his mother’s love; never once did he pretend to himself to be indifferent—yet his mind was sufficiently and maturely enough balanced to tell him that he was an exceedingly fortunate boy, leading save in one respect a singularly blest existence.

  CHAPTER IV

  TO HERSELF Olivia never acknowledged her inadequacy as a mother. It is doubtful if she was ever even aware of it. Strange as it may seem never once did she see Oliver’s side of the matter, never once was she aware of having withheld from her child his natural heritage. On the contrary she believed that Fate had perpetrated on her a very Cruel Hoax of which Oliver was the perpetual reminder. When he was away from her she was actually able to forget he was hers. But his presence in the house fretted and humiliated her.

  Just as years ago she had felt that Christopher was the sign apparent of her white blood, so now she felt that Oliver was the totality of that black blood which she so despised. And there was too much of it. In her own eyes it frightened and degraded her to think that within her veins, her arteries, her blood-vessels, coursed enough black blood to produce a child with skin as shadowed as Oliver’s.

  As enough water in a vessel absorbs and dissolves a stain, so that eventually one thinks there is nothing there but the liquid itself, so she had been positive that all her Negro blood had been wrought by her white blood to a consistency as pure, as limpid as that which flowed through the heart of the whitest woman she knew.

  To her Oliver meant shame. He meant more than that; he meant the expression of her failure to be truly white. There was some taint in her, she told herself once, not long after Oliver’s birth. . . . For she belonged to that group of Americans which thinks that God or Nature created only one perfect race—the Caucasians. . .

  The idea that there were more unwhite than white people in the world had for her no significance. Chinese, Negro, Indian, Malay . . . all of them as far as she was concerned were imperfections, base metals, misfits, garbage. Any union with them meant the introdu
ction into the social order of something corrupt, repulsive.

  Still she had to live with her husband. She was no fool. She did not care for whiteness to the ultimate degree of facing starvation. But she had thought in the early days of her obsession that if a child of hers could just marry a white person that everything else would fall into line. She would of course live with this new combination; there would be no question of their standing in that powerful and fortunate white world; it would be so easy with the money which, as a matter of course, she expected her husband to furnish, to push forward to newer heights of affluence and privilege.

  She never paused to think of the thousands of unsuccessful white families pressing in on her from every side. With all her will, and wit and native intelligence she never once saw that the fate of these indigent people, whom she and her precious welfare committees served, might so easily be hers.

  Of late most annoyingly her husband, usually so generous, had been less responsive to her demands for money. He had given her, it is true, all she had asked for the children. But he had turned a deaf ear to her requests for a sum sufficiently large to run the house on an entirely revolutionized basis.

  “A house,” she said bitterly, “run on the same scale as the houses of all the other women I know.”

  When she talked like this he despised her. He turned a hard gaze upon her. “Those other women have husbands who could buy and sell me. John D. Sturtevant has a seat on the stock-exchange in New York. He can’t conceive of living on a doctor’s paltry income.”

  “Mrs. Berklebach’s husband is a doctor.”

  “Look at his connections,” he said angrily. “The mayor is his brother-in-law and he has three cousins who are aldermen. . . . No use kidding yourself, Olivia. It takes wealth to play around with that class of white people. Colored folks simply don’t handle that amount of money. Perhaps they will some day. They seem eventually to get a finger in most pies. But if I had it I wouldn’t want to spend it in that manner. Trailing about with a lot of people who would drop you like a hot potato if they knew what you really are.”

  That, he knew perfectly well, would bring an end to the discussion. She did become quiet, but not, as he judged, because she was annoyed at his remarks. Only she was thinking that she mustn’t try him too far. The household bills this week were bound to be enormous. She was giving three luncheons; they were supposed to be simple; but in her mind the words expanded to “elaborate simplicity.” The new tablecloth alone would run into money. . . . Sally would be cross at the thought of so much extra cooking and the dishes and all. It would take something to calm her ruffled spirits. . . . If she just had a butler! Well, she’d just have to hire an extra waiter that was all.

  She told her husband of her decision. . . . “But I should think you would see, Christopher, that it would be cheaper to have a butler of our own. . . . Those Filipino butlers come very cheap.”

  “What would three people of our tastes be doing with a Filipino butler? You talk like a fool, Olivia!” About this conversation there was none of the gay badinage with which some couples discuss their expenses. “Then you’d be giving more parties to show off your butler. . . .”

  She said inattentively: “There’s Oliver’s money.” Grandfather and Grandmother Cary had recently passed on and the old man true to his promise had left everything to his youngest grandson, naming Dr. Cary as executor. The boy, however, with the exception of a definite sum set aside for his music and education, was to receive nothing until he was twenty-one.

  Her husband stared at her. “I should think you’d be ashamed to mention him!” Turning he left the room. He could not endure the thought of discussing this child.

  She did not even notice his departure . . . Oliver . . . there was a thought! . . . He was coming down the stairs, whistling. She called him.

  “Oliver, come here! Here in my room!”

  The whistling ceased. Rather apprehensively he stood on the doorsill of her room. “I—I hope my whistling didn’t annoy you, Mother.”

  “No, of course not, of course not. Come on in the room.”

  Still wary he advanced, still standing. Probably for the first time in years she looked at him attentively. How tall he was, she thought, surprised. And he was, he really was, just the color of that Filipino butler at Mrs. Berklebach’s. In his white shirt-sleeves he was immaculate. She half-closed her eyes, visualizing him in a white linen suit.

  “Oliver,” she said, “sit down. I want you to help me.”

  He was surprised, pleasantly so, his senses wanted to tell him. But he was a boy who needed few lessons. He kept his pleasure in check.

  “Oliver, I’m going to have a lot of ladies here this week; ladies on my committees, you know. . . . There’s a convention going on in Philadelphia and I’m on the Committee of Entertainment. I think you know what it means to me to do it well?”

  Privately he thought her committee meetings rather silly; just a lot of old women gabbing together. He had barely seen them, for when they were there she insisted on his keeping his room or else staying out the entire afternoon. She didn’t want any noisy boys about, she had said coldly. . . . Once he had peeped over the banisters to see if any of them were pretty, like Marise, or jolly, like her mother. A single glance had sufficed and he had retired to his room and his books disgusted and thenceforth incurious. . . . Well, he couldn’t tell her that. He waited.

  “I wanted your father to let me get a butler but he says he’s unable to do that . . . he can’t afford it. . . .”

  Under his golden skin he flushed painfully, thinking that she was referring to his little allowance. “But, Mother, you know I don’t have very much. . . . Grandfather said I couldn’t spend my money till I was twenty-one. If I had my way you could have it all to get as many butlers as you wanted. . . .”

  “As though I’d take your money! . . . No, I was wondering if you could help me out . . . if you knew some boy . . . if he was tall enough, no one would notice that he was very young . . . about your color. Somebody who wasn’t awkward . . . and of course he’d have to be very clean. . . .”

  He said, doubtfully, looking at her with his candid eyes: “There’s Ted Rutherford. He’s about my color and my height . . . only I don’t think he’s so awfully clean.”

  “Oh,” she said, watching him intently, “that settles him. I couldn’t think of an untidy boy.”

  “No, of course you couldn’t,” he acquiesced warmly. “But I can’t think of anyone else. Unless . . . unless you’d be willing for me to do it.”

  Even as she hesitated she permitted her face to show her relief. “I hardly feel like asking you to do that, Oliver. . . . And then what would your father say? But it would help me out a lot if you would. And it would be kind of fun too. . . .”

  “Well then, let me do it, Mother! Father doesn’t have to know.” Ordinarily he would have been the last person in the world to suggest keeping anything a secret from his father. . . . But it was so wonderful to have that secret with his mother! . . . “You know I’m clean and I’m tall enough and you can tell me every little thing you want me to do. And I’ll do it just right.”

  She was a little bit frightened and anxious . . . her half-thought-out plan was almost too successful. “You know, you’d have to take orders, Oliver, from the ladies and from—from me—just like somebody really hired.” In her heart, hard and containing nothing but her hateful obsession, she had the grace to be ashamed of herself.

  In his innocence, his trustfulness, he had no idea of what she meant. “That would be all right, Mother. I’ll probably never see those ladies again. They’ll never dream I’m your son.” . . .

  No, she thought, now they would never dream it.

  She bought him the white linen suit. Of his own volition he purchased “Congolene” and slicked back his thick, wild, curly hair. . . . On these three occasions he waited at table laughing and joking so about it in the kitchen that unwittingly he dispelled Sally’s surprise and made her take her additio
nal tasks as pleasantly as he. . . . Later on in the fall afternoons his mother had a little series of “at homes” and expected and received his help as a matter of course. It was quite a joke between them and made his surface life in the house much more endurable.

  Teresa did not come home for that Christmas vacation, but Christopher did. He was resolved at first to spend all his time with his brother; there was no end in his mind to the half-formed plans he had in store for him. But when he saw the smile, when he heard the occasional playful word which Olivia directed toward the lad a load rolled from his spirit. . . . Perhaps after all he need not have taken so seriously the note which Marise had sent him two months ago. . . . He began to make plans of his own; plans which did not include Oliver.

  In the late afternoon he came back from a crowded day spent with Pete Holland, the Talliver boys and Kid Hastings. There had been many reminiscences, a few hands of “Black Jack,” a tasty lunch which the Talliver boys’ mother had provided. . . . A small enough price, she considered it, to pay for the knowledge of the presence of her boys in the house, instead of the fearful suspicion that they were on some street corner. They had talked gravely of different brands of cigarettes; of their schools; of their futures; of the season’s quota of dances; of some girls. . . .

  Christopher was to see Marise that night. She was having a little party. He would get his bath early; lie around the house a little; maybe the kid would play for him. He walked down Girard Avenue, noticing the stark trees against the clear winter light; the sky was very blue and deep. The air struck cold against his cheek but his hands and heart were warm. . . .

  He happened to be one of those people who find Philadelphia perfect. A city of homes, he thought gratefully; he was glad his own home was so quiet and peaceful . . . and pleasant. Why, the kid and his mother were doing fine. It was better that he and Teresa had cleared out; in that way his mother had come to realize the preciousness of her younger son.