by Gwen Florio
Maybe she’d read the story in the Afro. But Nora doubted Virginia could have recognized her from a thirty-three-year-old prom photo. She threw a paper napkin atop the puddle, picked up her glass and held it to her neck, her pulse hot against it, willing her arteries to carry the cool through her veins to the rest of her body, calm the emotions stirred by Alden’s revelations about his marriage.
A swish of nylon heralded the waitress’s return. But she hustled on past, uniform rustling in her haste, to clear a table that someone had just left.
‘Coffee?’ Nora called after her. But she gave no sign of having heard. Nora turned, trying to catch her eye. The woman looked tired, shifting from one sneaker-clad foot to the other as she worked. Probably already thinking of going home, shedding the heat-trapping nylon uniform, lying on her bed in her underwear, a washcloth wrung under cold water draped over her eyes, letting the drone of lawnmowers, the bumblebees humming in the hollyhocks, lull her into something approaching sleep for just a few blessed minutes before it was time for her to rise, to prepare a meal that didn’t require an oven, to call the kids in from the street, kiss the husband home from work, all the things that her next shift required.
Nora gave up on coffee and turned her attention to the menu, which served all its selections all day long, offering hungover patrons Salisbury steak for breakfast if they so desired, or omelets for dinner. Nora had thought to order breakfast, but the day was already so warm that the thought of hot food did not appeal.
She eyed the photo of the Waldorf salad, its reds and greens garish on the menu’s plastic page, anticipating the dollop of mayo and crunch of apple, the meaty walnuts and the nutritionally bereft iceberg lettuce, and nary a mention of kale.
Virginia swished past again, a tray of dirty coffee mugs in her hands.
‘Coffee?’ Nora tried again, but she was already gone, disappearing through the swinging doors that led into the kitchen.
The jingling bell on the diner’s door announced a new arrival, a black couple about Nora’s age. They wore knee-length shorts and roomy T-shirts with images of Ocean City, and Nora took them for tourists, maybe up from Washington, taking a break from a week at the beach to do a little antiquing. Virginia arrived with their water before they’d even slid into the booth, standing there with a glass in each hand until they’d settled themselves, telling them about the blue-crab omelet special. ‘Those crabs were pulled from the bay yesterday. You won’t get any fresher.’
Nora wondered whether she should switch her order from the salad to the omelet, fresh crabmeat entirely absent during her years in Colorado. She waved, this time calling the woman’s name, adding the honorific in hopes of appeasing whatever she’d done to offend her.
‘Miss Virginia?’
Yet again, the woman passed her by, this time with a disdainful sniff. At the cash register stand, Janet Reston laid down her pen and pushed the newspaper aside.
The couple who’d just come in pored over the menu with true curiosity, although when Virginia next appeared, the woman turned an anticipatory smile upon her and announced, ‘Looks like you’ve sold us on those omelets.’
‘You won’t be sorry,’ Virginia said. ‘And I’ve taken the liberty of setting aside a couple of slices of peach pie for you. On the house.’
Janet Reston’s gaze went back and forth, from the couple enthusing about Virginia’s generosity to Nora’s table.
‘I’d like an omelet, too, please.’ Nora raised her menu, pointing to the slip advertising the crab omelet special paper-clipped to the front. ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me.’ Irritation sharpened her words.
Virginia finally turned her way, fixing her with a long, heavy-lidded look.
The couple ceased their desultory conversation, belatedly realizing that something was coiling, rearing up, opening a wide white mouth, exposing the venom-filled fangs.
‘No,’ Virginia said. ‘I did not.’
She turned away, nearly bumping into Janet, who’d come out from behind her stand and waited with hands on hips.
‘Virginia,’ she said, and despite the ultimatum in her posture, there was pleading in her tone. ‘Why don’t you bring Nora some coffee? Take her order?’
Virginia’s tone was careless, almost bored.
‘I ain’t bringing her shit. And I sure as hell ain’t taking any orders from her.’
‘What the …?’ Nora dropped her menu.
‘Virginia! What in the world could you possibly have against Nora?’
Virginia’s smile was infinitely worse than her previous impassivity. ‘She knows.’ She addressed Nora directly for the first time. ‘Don’t you?’
And, at Nora’s look of bewilderment, added, ‘Maybe you didn’t notice me a couple mornings back, but for sure I noticed you. In that boat. With that cop. The one that shot Robert Evans. Putting this place right back where it was all those years ago, the way I grew up hearing about.’
The woman fishing from the bridge. Who’d clearly recognized Alden. And, even if she hadn’t known Nora, had remembered her face.
Janet’s hands slid from her hips. She clasped them before her, fingers twining and repositioning themselves, trying to wring hope from a hopeless situation. Because what else could she possibly do?
‘You’ve worked here for how many years now? Ten? Fifteen? Don’t throw it all away like this.’
Virginia looked down at the nametag on her chest as though she’d never seen it before. She raised a hand and worked the pin loose. She reached her other hand around her back and untied her apron at the waist, then unfastened the strings around the neck. It slid to the floor. She dropped the nametag atop it and began the long, slow walk toward the door.
The kitchen door swung open, thudding against the wall. The kitchen help – a dishwasher, a busboy, a cook, all of them black – fell in line behind Virginia, the cook reaching reflexively around her to push open the front door, standing aside to let Virginia go first, followed by the busboy and dishwasher, the front of his white uniform one long wet splotch of sudsy water. He started to step through the door himself, then stood aside a final time, holding it wide for the couple who’d come in late, and from far away, but not so far they didn’t realize instantly what was happening and opted not to sit idly by.
Unlike Nora.
Who sat frozen watching the exit of every black person in the building, leaving only white people behind, all of them staring, some already reaching for their phones, eager to transmit this latest tidbit about the ongoing scandal that was Nora Best.
TWENTY-SIX
Nora drove home in a hurry, hoping to get to Quail House before the biddies heard what had happened in the Wagon Wheel and took it upon themselves to inform her mother of every delicious detail.
She breathed a sigh of relief upon finding the kitchen dark and deserted, and unplugged the land line there. But Penelope had a bedside phone, too, and – as a lifetime believer in the restorative power of an afternoon nap – was almost certainly lying beside it.
Nora stood outside the closed door of the first-floor suite that had been her grandparents’ room and, later, her parents’. She’d taken over their spacious second-floor room with the fireplace and a sitting area, becoming the envy of her friends. She tried to think of a pretext for entering without knocking. The doors in Quail House had latches instead of knobs, heavy wrought-iron affairs that rattled noisily when lifted. Nora put a fingertip to the latch, edging it up by degrees, letting out her breath as the door swung silently open.
Penelope lay within, slight as a child beneath the light summer blanket, white hair in disarray upon the pillow, mouth slack, a slug-trail of spittle from its corner. Nora touched an edge of blanket to it and then smoothed her mother’s hair, fingertips recoiling from the pink scalp that was too stark a reminder of the skull beneath. The phone sat atop a rosewood box on the nightstand. She reached behind the nightstand and unplugged it.
Penelope’s breath escaped in a low moan. Her lips moved. Nora leaned close. �
��What, Mother?’
A puff of air. ‘Oh, Grace. You’re always here.’
Nora smiled and touched her lips to her mother’s forehead, unwilling to disturb her sleep by dragging her back to the present. At least for this little while, Penelope could rest untroubled by her daughter’s latest escapades. She straightened and looked with satisfaction toward the silenced phone. A folded newspaper clipping lay beside it.
She glanced again at her mother, waiting for the reassuring rise and fall of the blanket, then reached for the clipping and unfolded it to find the initial story about the shooting: the cop car and the Kia, the photos of Robert Evans and the uncle for whom he was presumably named, Bobby.
Nora refolded the clipping and replaced it. She had a moment’s bitter thought to re-attach the phones – if her mother was so damned interested in the case, she’d soon hear more than she ever wanted – and hurried from the room before she could give in to the impulse.
‘You don’t even know about what happened back then,’ Grace had said. ‘That’s a crime.’
And the waitress, Virginia, in the Wagon Wheel: ‘Putting this place right back where it was.’
Not to mention the cryptic comment from the stranger, upon seeing the flyer about the pending march: ‘How many times can one town burn?’
‘Ask your mother,’ Grace had advised. Which she would do. Eventually. But not until she knew as much as possible about what had happened so that Penelope couldn’t wriggle away from her questions.
Which brought her back to town, detouring through side streets so as not to pass the Wagon Wheel, heading to the library with something Emily Beattie had said in mind: ‘All the newspapers sent reporters, the Sun, the News-Post, the Washington Post and the Afro. And, of course, the Chateau Crier covered it, too.’
She installed herself in a carrel just off the stacks in the 700 section – plays, poetry, literary criticism; the library’s least visited aisle – and set out to educate herself.
There was no internet all those decades ago, nobody posting selfies every other day. The only photo of Bobby Evans accompanying the first newspaper stories about the shooting was the standard high school portrait from his junior year in 1963 that had appeared in the Crier. Full Afros, those grand defiant halos, had yet to come into style, but Bobby’s photo contained a hint of what was to come, an inch higher than the close-cropped styles of the fifties. It softened an otherwise severe face. Bobby smiling into the camera, facing a future that would end only a few years after that carefully posed photo.
She pushed her chair back from the desk and stared unseeing at the screen, instead conjuring the Chateau of the time. A slow, sultry feel to the images. People sauntering rather than striding briskly. Both women and men dressing up to go downtown, even if downtown consisted of only a few stores on a three-block street just minutes from their own homes. The point was, they would be seen. Roles strictly delineated by age, gender, race. People knew their place, even though black and white, comfortably well-off and poor, were constantly thrown together by sheer proximity, the town too small for physical avoidance that went beyond the smallest of ways, those ways assuming outsize importance as a result. Brown eyes never meeting blue. The sidestep, the bowed head.
What sort of resentment had simmered beneath those soft-spoken ‘yessuhs’ and ‘yes’ms’? Or in the diner’s kitchen, as sweat dripped into steaming dishwater, where black hands were allowed to scrape the greasy remnants of food from the plates and wash them clean, but never serve those same plates in the comfort of the dining room? Among the teachers in the ‘colored’ school on the far end of town, each fall distributing the years-outdated textbooks that were the hand-me-downs from the gleaming new school for white students?
And for Bobby and Grace, what must it have been like to have grown up in that atmosphere and then suddenly be transported to Baltimore, dropped into the middle of an all-black neighborhood, not just a few blocks as in Chateau but acres and acres, no more need for the constant wariness of survival? To lift one’s head, laugh loud at jokes, pick up the pace to match the bustle of a big city? For Bobby, heading into college, that pace must have felt like a sprint.
Nora thought of her own introduction to college, the small-town girl thrown into a campus larger than her entire hometown, that early mingled sense of terror and freedom. How much more intense it would have been in her parents’ time, the whole country in ferment over race and war and – ever so faintly – the first hints of feminism. Bobby Evans would have been in the thick of it, so flush with hope and purpose that he’d volunteered to go back to Chateau to goose into being the changes that had already come, no matter how reluctantly, to much of the rest of the country.
Nora went back to the screen and clicked around some more, faster now, eyes adjusting to the tiny type, the jumbled layout of those long-ago newspapers.
Bobby had hardly begun his work in Chateau when he’d been killed. The first story about his death, in the hometown paper, was nearly as brief as that about his nephew’s.
Negro Found Dead.
Nora supposed that passed for politeness. Earlier she’d scrolled past repeated references to ‘colored.’
The body of Robert Evans, 20, Negro, of Baltimore, was found Sunday morning on the banks of the Lenape River by a passing fisherman.
Police Chief William Smythe said Evans, a Chateau native who moved with his family to Baltimore, returned recently with a group of Negroes intent on disrupting Chateau’s orderly progress of integration. He pointed to recent actions at the town diner and the school administration building as examples.
Smythe speculated that Evans ran afoul of local Negroes resentful of outsiders coming into their community.
‘He came here to stir up trouble,’ Smythe said, ‘and unfortunately for his family, it looks like he found it.’
Evans leaves behind his parents and two siblings.
End of story. No mention of cause of death, nor even the courtesy of naming the other family members.
She scrolled and scrolled through subsequent weeks. Stories of the unrest that roiled Chateau in the weeks following Bobby’s death crowded the front page, accounts of street scuffles and beatings of black residents sharing space with stories about the 4-H fair, the annual chicken fry, the Social Notes.
Mrs Alexander Massey hosted a flower-arranging workshop, followed by a light repast of chicken salad, iced tea and petit fours. In attendance were Mrs Benjamin Parker, Mrs Gordon Tucker and the young Mrs Andrew Baggs, recently married.
It was a window on to an earlier time, when women had yet to claim their own names. Nora wondered who the young Mrs Andrew Baggs had been before she ceded her name to her husband; wondered what it was like for her to be ushered into the world of matrons. Imagined her hesitating over the bite-sized petit fours, their glazed pastel surfaces topped with tiny sugar flowers, paralyzed over the issue of fingers or fork. Wondered if the new wife was still enveloped in the happy haze of sex, or if the frisson had already faded, leaving her to contemplate the fact that the rest of her life stretched ahead of her in endless rituals of flower arrangements and cake decorating and painting classes – their subjects safe still lifes, heaps of fruit tumbling from copper bowls on to gleaming mahogany tables, or gauzy seascapes, never anything so daring as the human form – nothing to show for it decades later but some inept efforts framed and hung in a guest room and the ability to make her own damn petit fours.
But of Bobby Evans? Nothing more than a single sentence, dropped nearly word for word in every story about escalating unrest: The problems began after Robert Evans, a Baltimore Negro born in Chateau, was found shot to death.
Problems. A man dead, a church burned, a family’s hearts broken.
And, even though Nora clicked impatiently through the days, still no arrest.
‘We’re investigating the possibility that this might also have been drug-related,’ said Chief William Smythe. ‘We’ve seen an uptick in marijuana coming into the county. Drug dealers have d
iscovered our little town. Or it could have been suicide. It wouldn’t surprise me that the reaction of the law-abiding Negroes here to his attempts to stir up trouble might have engendered despair. Maybe he was too embarrassed to go back to Baltimore and admit failure.’
Nora turned last to the Afro-American, the venerable chronicler of Baltimore’s black community, and, when she did, her audible cry prompted several shushes from those working around her in the library.
‘Suicide,’ his sister told the Afro, her bitterness fairly oozing from the word on the page. ‘The night before the biggest event of his life.’
The Afro had dutifully contacted Chief Smythe and confronted him with Grace Evans’s accusations.
‘These things are naturally hard for a family to accept,’ he’d said. ‘And I sympathize, believe me, I do. I knew Bobby before he fell in with the wrong crowd up there in Baltimore. He worked in my home, along with his sister. Fine family, not a bit of a problem with any of them. If you ask me the last colored people in Chateau to cause trouble, I’d have said the Evanses. But as I said, that was before they moved away. I tried to explain all this to his sister, what a h--- of a thing it was, but she was having none of it. A shame.’
Nora put a hand to her burning face, mortified at the paternalism of it all. He’d done everything but call them ‘my’ colored people.
Not so much as an excuse me, ma’am, for the mild cursing, unremarkable now, but still impermissible, in that day and age, in the presence of a lady. Of course, Grace would never have been considered a lady. She was a woman, a black woman, and the little courtesies didn’t apply, not even to a heartbroken sister.
