Josh was my constant companion during my pregnancy and he fell in love with me, but I loved Rodney too much to even notice Josh. When you were born and I went through with the adoption, Josh thought I couldn’t love him and he moved on.
When I look back, I think Josh was hoping I’d keep you and marry him, but, like I said, I didn’t love him. I loved Rodney.
Josh stayed in your life. He always felt he was your surrogate dad because he had nurtured you for seven and a-half months while I was pregnant, and he delivered you.
Rodney and I reconnected at Catfish's funeral just after he'd completed law school and I'd finished grad school. We decided to get married; he would move to New York. I came back and waited for him but he never arrived. So many things happened and, in order to keep his family safe, we had to give up on our dream to be together.
I was devastated.
About six months later I met you. You were four and I fell in love with you the first time I saw your auburn curls bounce as you jumped up and down behind your mom's skirt. Finding you was the best decision of my life.
It took a while for me to learn to live without the hope of marrying Rodney. He went to Vietnam, met someone, and was engaged to be married. You were about five when Josh came back into my life. It was inevitable. He was a big part of your life with your parents, and I had become part of your lives, too. We took it slow, and as I healed from Rodney I fell in love with Josh. He was a great man and I'll always be grateful we had him for the time we did.
I stopped talking because when I thought about Josh, I still felt empty inside and missed him. Lilly had tears in her eyes, too. "I loved him, too, you know."
"Yes, I know sweetheart. And you were his little girl. He adored you. He knew you in the womb. He was the first person to see you when you came into this world. He remained in your life, the one constant person… I'm so sorry we lost him." She put her head on my chest, folded her arms around me, and sobbed. I didn't have the guts to tell her Josh's death was all my fault.
I felt her nod her head on my chest and her tears soaked through my blouse.
A couple of days after we arrived in Jean Ville, I went to see my dad. I'd made it a habit of going by every other day when I was in town. If he was hateful I left, but if he was civil I would sit and visit with him. He eventually realized that his words could run me off and he tried harder to be nice to me.
He was sitting on the front porch when I pulled up in the driveway. I stopped my car in front rather than drive to the back where I usually entered. I walked through the yard and up the front steps, went over to him, kissed the top of his head and sat in the rocker next to him.
"How are you feeling today, Daddy?"
"I'm okay. I wish I could move around better. I wish I had something to do. I'm bored." He rocked and stared straight ahead. He didn't look at me and I couldn't remember the last time he had. I stood up and faced him. I put the toes of my shoe on one of the rocker legs to stop the motion.
"Look at me, Daddy." I had my hands on my hips. He looked up, then looked immediately over my shoulder, almost like he was staring at my earlobe. "Look. I need to tell you something. It's important and I need to look you in the eye when I say it." I couldn't believe I was bold enough to talk to my dad that way. I'd always been so frightened of him. Those days were over.
"I'm getting married again." That got his attention.
"You're what?" He looked at me and his body language said he wanted to spring out of his chair and choke me, but he couldn't physically spring, or jump, or barely walk without being winded.
"I'm getting married, which shouldn't be a big deal. It's who I'm marrying that you need to come to terms with." I still had my toes on the rocker, preventing him from moving and he was gripping both arms of the chair so tightly his knuckles were white.
"Not that nigga"
"Rodney Thibault." I didn't flinch.
"Not in my town. You can't embarrass me here. Go back to New York if you want to marry a ni__er."
"You hypocrite. You had a thirty-year affair with a black woman and you have the nerve…?"
"I never married her!"
"But you had a child with her. A beautiful young woman who is my sister whom you’ve never acknowledged.” I took my foot off the rocker and it lurched forward as if it was going to throw him out. I pushed on both his shoulders to steady him and he sat back as if the air had been sucked out of him. "Maybe you should think about that." I turned and went down the steps to the front yard and walked across the warm grass to my car.
When I walked back into the house on Gravier Road, the sweet smell of lilies from the always-arriving white flowers filled the air and I thought of how good it felt to be honest and brave.
*
Sissy and I talked about how to tell our mother about my engagement and decided that I should break the news to her in person. We drove to Houston together the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Although we'd spoken on the phone a few times since Dad's illness began, I hadn't seen Mama in ten years and wondered how she would handle our reunion.
"Look. We forgave her and have been trying to rebuild our relationships. Surely she won't judge you." Sissy was measuring the windows in the apartment I'd had built over the new garage and I was sitting on the floor turning the pages of magazines that had examples of draperies.
"Don't be so sure, Sissy. Mama is as prejudiced as the day is long. She can take up with a Mafia man, but a colored man? I don't know whether she'll be able to swallow it."
"I can't wait to meet Rodney. Lilly is really taken with him." She dropped the tape measure and it rolled over to where I was sitting on the floor. She stooped to pick it up and my ring caught her eye. "When did you get that rock?"
"Last week." I put my hand in hers and she examined my engagement ring. "I haven't been wearing it. Waiting until I've broken the news to certain people."
"Whew! It's really something."
"He's wonderful, Sissy. You'll love him." I knew I was beaming but couldn't help myself. When I thought about Rodney I smiled with my whole face. Sissy started laughing at me.
"I hope I meet someone one day who makes me glow like Rodney makes you glow." She hugged me and I hugged her back.
"I hope so, too. I really do. And I hope he's white because this is hard."
"But worth it, right?"
"I guess we'll see whether we can make it work in Jean Ville or whether we'll have to live somewhere else."
"Oh. Are ya'll thinking about living here? Are you crazy?"
"Rodney wants to come back and go into practice with his brother when he gets out of the army in May. I don't want to be so far away from him again."
“You need to think long and hard about that.” Sissy turned around and didn’t say any more.
*
It was about noon when Sissy and I pulled into a semicircular driveway in front of a two-story brick house in a subdivision on the north side of Houston, the address James had given us. Sissy double-checked the map and said, "This is it."
"She does know we are coming, right?"
"Yes, I talked to her on the phone last night." We drove under a portico. A doorman approached the car and opened the door for Sissy to get out, then came around to my side. I was already standing on the concrete, the car keys in my hand.
"May I have your keys so I can park your car, ma'am?" I handed him the keys and Sissy and I stepped up to the double wood-stained doors under a long veranda with white columns that reached to the roof of the second story. Six tall windows spanned the front of the house on the lower level and above us were four sets of French doors with individual terraces. The house had a regal appearance with its topiaries and massive flowerbeds filled with azaleas, camellias, holly and oak trees, and huge pecan trees that lined the driveway. Wisteria vines grew up two of the columns and made the air smell fragrant and fresh even in the hundred-degree heat.
Sissy used the brass doorknocker and laughed at the lio
n's head embossed on it. A Hispanic housekeeper in a starched black dress with a white pinafore opened the door and asked our names. Sissy said, "Abigail and Susanna Burton." We both giggled but it didn't escape me that Sissy didn't say Susanna Ryan.
The maid ushered us down a hall and into a solarium on the side of the house, through double glass doors that opened to a terrace that extended into a colorful garden. Mama was wearing a blue silk flowing kaftan. Her formerly mousey brown hair, now with golden highlights, had obviously been "coiffed" at an exclusive salon, swept up on one side into a flip, the other tucked behind her ear, a bit of a bang across one half of her forehead. She had on huge diamond earrings and another brilliant stone on her left hand that had to be six or eight carats. On her feet were what looked like glass slippers with one-inch heels, but they were probably some sort of plastic. Sticking out of the ends were pink toenails, recently pedicured. She wore make-up, something she'd never done, nor did I remember her having her hair done or wearing jewelry of any kind except her simple gold wedding band.
She was sitting in a wing-backed chair in front of an unlit fireplace reading a book. She looked up at us as though it were normal for me and Sissy to walk into her house, and she said, "Hello, girls. Have a seat." She asked the housekeeper if she had offered us refreshments and Sissy and I looked at each other and giggled, thinking, when did Mama get so highfalutin?
We didn't hug or kiss or touch. It was as though we were strangers who had come to interview her for a high-fashion Houston magazine. The maid returned with a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea. We sat at a round marble-topped table with high-backed chairs set inside a huge bay window, picked at our food, and tried to make casual conversation.
When you've had real tragedies like I'd had, you don't have the time or patience for surface talk and suppressed truths. After an hour of conversation about the weather, Houston's politics, decorating ideas, and fashion, I became impatient.
"Did Daddy ever hit you?" I looked directly at Mama who sat back in her chair as if she'd been struck. The expression on her face went from pretend happiness to utter pain for just a second. I witnessed the curtain fall and retract before her face returned to something akin to nonchalance.
"Susanna! Why would you ask a question like that?" She took a sip of her iced tea and looked at the long, manicured fingernails on her left hand as if examining them for any sharp cuticles left behind by a negligent salon assistant. Her hands looked strange to me as I remembered her nails bitten to the quick and cuticles torn and sometimes bleeding.
"We all know what he was capable of," I said. "He beat me up so bad I had to be hospitalized, and that was just one of the many times. What about you?"
"Let's say we had disagreements that didn't turn out so well." Mama stood up and walked across the huge room to the fireplace.
"Yes, well, I happen to know that you are the one who made him beat me up the time he almost killed me." There was dead silence and her stare was blank. "What kind of mother does that to her child?"
She put both hands on the mantle and bent her head so that her forehead rested on top of the ornate, marble fireplace. Sissy got up and went to her. She wrapped her arms around Mama's waist and lay her head on Mama's back. Mama turned around and they hugged.
I watched them as if I was observing a movie. It didn't seem real, they didn't seem real, nothing seemed real. But the ice was broken and we sat down to some serious conversation where we learned of the mental, physical, and emotional abuse Mama had endured for twenty-five years.
We heard about her desperate escape from Jean Ville when Daddy was ill because it was the first time she felt he could not follow her and force her to come back. She talked about how she hid out in a small rental house that her sister, Betty, helped her pay for. Mama said she met John, the man who owned the mansion where she now lived, at a restaurant. He was introduced by a friend of Aunt Betty's husband, Rick, a shady character I didn't trust.
"Mama, I have something to tell you." I took her shaking hand in mine and held it on top of the table. She looked at me then looked at our hands. "I'm getting married."
"Again?" she pulled her hand away and reached for her iced tea.
"Yes. What you need to know is who I'm marrying." I tried to get her to meet my eyes but hers darted from Sissy to her tea to her plate and back to Sissy. We were all quiet. "Rodney Thibault. Ray Thibault's son."
"I know who he is. He's a niggra. Maybe a high yellow. A mulatto. But he's still a n__gra." She stood up and her chair almost fell over backwards, teetered, then sat upright with a thud. Mama walked out of the solarium, through the glass doors, into the flower garden outside. Sissy followed her and closed the door behind them.
Drama, I thought; always, drama.
I watched them talk and argue; Mama cried, wrung her hands, then walked away from Sissy. Sissy followed and grabbed Mama's shoulders. Finally, they hugged and stood in an embrace for a long time. I could tell they were whispering to each other.
When they came back inside I was sitting on the divan thumbing through Home and Garden magazine.
Mama rang a bell that was sitting on the table and asked the maid to set up the bar in the solarium. A few minutes later, the unnamed, un-introduced Hispanic lady rolled a glass-shelved cart with a crystal ice bucket and glasses on a mirrored tray into the room. Behind her was the butler, who carried an additional tray with six or eight decanters full of brown and clear liquids.
"Gerald, I'll have a dry Martini, two olives." Mama turned to Sissy and winked. It was the first time she resembled the mother I'd known as a child. "What will you girls have?"
"Oh, I'm not drinking. I'm driving back to Jean Ville tonight."
"Oh, Susie, please stay the night. I want you and Sissy to meet John. We'll have a lovely dinner to celebrate your engagement. You can drive back tomorrow." She looked at me as though pleading; something I'd never known my mother to do. I glanced at Sissy and she nodded. When mother turned around Sissy mouthed, "lovely," and we both cracked up.
"It's up to you, of course," Sissy finally said. "But I'd like to stay."
"May I use your phone? I need to make sure it's okay to leave Lilly."
"Who's Lilly?" Mama asked, but I was ushered to the phone in John's study by the maid, who actually had a name: Hannah.
I called and spoke with Tootsie who said the girls were fine and I should stay as long as I liked. I wanted to talk to Lilly, but she was in town with Tom's wife, Gloria, and Anna and Chrissy. Tootsie promised to have her call me when she returned to the Quarters. I gave her my mother's phone number and hung up.
"Sissy was just telling me about the little girl you adopted."
"I didn't adopt her. I have custody."
"Oh. What's the difference?"
"Mama, let me tell you the truth. She's Rodney's daughter. Rodney's and mine." I had to catch her as she collapsed, very dramatically. Her Martini hit the marble floor and the glass broke into a million tiny shards. Hannah and Gerald came running in and started to clean the mess while I helped Mama into her chair where she swooned, then came around, but we didn’t talk about Lilly again.
When John Maceo came into the solarium, the mess was cleaned up and Mama was half-way through her second Martini. He kissed her on the forehead and she introduced us. He shook our hands and repeated our names as Mama said them.
"Abigail, so nice to meet you. You look like your mother. That's a compliment." Sissy did look like Mama and she could imitate anyone. Behind John's back, she pretended to shake an invisible hand and mouthed words, "Abigail, it's so nice to meet you."
Sissy is fairly short and petite with a perfect figure. I'm tall and lanky with almost no figure compared to her and we look nothing alike. My eyes are blue-grey, a dull color and are shapeless, and too big.
Sissy drew attention when she walked into a room. She had brown hair that she highlighted to a rich, honey blond and blue-green eyes shaped like sideways teardrops. Back t
hen she wore outrageous clothes, like hip-hugger bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts. She had two pierced earrings in each earlobe and one in the top of her right ear from which she wore a dangling rhinestone thing. She went to college for a couple years but didn't like it; her forte was music and she could play the piano like a concert artist.
"Susanna, it's a pleasure." John shook my hand and looked at my ear, as if he couldn't make eye-to-eye contact. He was a handsome Italian man with dark wavy hair and a large nose, late fifties or early sixties, not an old man like James described him. He said he was a businessman with offices in downtown Houston, which sounded important but a bit nebulous, and his demeanor was akin to Mafia types I'd read about. His eyes gave him a Cary Grant look; long thick eyelashes that were about a quarter of the way closed. He seemed to be peering at you out of only two-thirds of his lower eyes, as if just awakened from a deep sleep.
"The pleasure is mine." I can keep pace with him, I thought and act formal and highbrowed. It occurred to me that I might be as wealthy as John Maceo and probably more educated. It was a fleeting thought, though, because I didn't care one whit about the money Josh left me and Lilly. I was, however, proud of my education.
John picked up a crystal highball glass and filled it halfway with bourbon—no ice, no water—that he gulped; then he poured another half-glass and sipped it. Mama was in her cups and asked Sissy to play the piano. There was a baby grand in the huge hallway between the solarium and the dining room, but all the rooms were connected because there were huge openings, no doors, and continuous marble floors.
Sissy sat down and began playing Fur Elise, Daddy's favorite. Mama made a face and asked her to play Me and My Shadow. Mama and John danced and followed each other around the room like one was the leader, the other the shadow. It was cute and I could tell they were happy together. And a little drunk.
We all sat at one end of a dining table that seated twenty people and ate steaks, au gratin potatoes, and salad. It was the first time I could remember seeing my mother laugh. John played straight man to Sissy's comedic routines and they were hysterical.
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