Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  Emma looked down to see a cameo on the front of a little gold box hanging from a golden chain.

  “You can wear it when you grow up,” he said. “Now, don’t lose it or wind it too much.”

  And then he showed Emma the little knob on the back. When he wound it, out tinkled “The Blue Danube.”

  “You know how to dance?” he asked.

  Emma nodded. “I take lessons. I do ballet.”

  Isidore bowed formally and took her hand, and to the music from the tiny box he and his granddaughter waltzed across the floor.

  “Next time you come I’ll teach you the foxtrot,” he called after them as he waved goodbye at his apartment door.

  * * *

  Emma loved many things about her Uncle George—his teasing, the way his arm around her made her feel, the long black Cadillac he drove, where all three kids and Aunt Ruth snuggled in the backseat. And she liked the smell of the cigar he smoked and the twinkle of gold in his front teeth.

  One night he took them to a restaurant and sat them all down. With a big wave of his hand he said, “Order anything you want.” Emma had never seen anyone like that. Her Uncle George must be rich as a king.

  When she opened her mouth to say what she wanted her mother had frowned at her, but still, before her on a big round tray had appeared something hot and red and yellow and bubbling. She looked at Uncle George with a question on her face. He slapped himself on the forehead in disbelief.

  “Jake, she doesn’t know pizza? Where the hell do you live? Beyond the moon?”

  “In Louisiana,” Jake laughed, “the dark side of the moon.” Rosalie frowned, but Emma’s father had suddenly found his tongue. He told them about catfish and cornpone, a world where you couldn’t buy pumpernickel bread. They all laughed, even Rosalie then, though Emma could see from the look on her face she didn’t really understand.

  Something in Emma’s heart was battering blindly then, struggling like a butterfly to escape into the clear blue air where the possibilities existed for dancing and laughter and music and tall buildings and conversations long into the night, where people who were kin to one another gathered around breakfast tables and drank cup after cup of coffee and ate exotic foods and teased and shared secrets and told stories about the past.

  * * *

  The last night in Connecticut before they had to pile back into the Chevy and begin the endless trip back home, Emma and Ed balanced each other slowly up and down on the teeter-totter in the backyard. It was twilight and the bushes thrummed with the voices of insects. A couple of stars shone, the bravest, brightest ones, but it would be a long time before the heavens filled. Darkness came very late to the Northern summer sky.

  “That’s the North Star,” Ed said.

  Emma looked and nodded. “We have that in Louisiana too.” Ed laughed. Their days together had been spent in comparing and contrasting, measuring the differences and similarities in their worlds. They had discovered that humor was one thing they shared that was not defined by geography.

  “How do I know if you have stars? You don’t have pizza.”

  “You don’t have grits.”

  “Who would want ’em?”

  “You don’t have,” Emma paused, searching for something, anything, that she had not seen in this place that seemed to encompass all the wonders of the world, “you don’t have niggers.”

  “No,” said Ed in a changed voice, “we don’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Because we have Negroes, stupid.”

  “That’s what I just said. You’re being dumb.”

  “No, you’re being dumb. I didn’t say ‘niggers,’ I said ‘Negroes.’”

  “They’re the same thing. And I haven’t seen any anywhere, except some in New York.”

  “Emma, do you know that ‘nigger’ is a bad word?”

  She just stared at him, but something pinged deep inside and the blood of embarrassment began to rise.

  “It’s bad to use it to people’s faces,” she said. “You say ‘colored.’ But it’s okay to use when no niggers are around. Everybody does.”

  “Not everybody here. It’s not nice.”

  “Well, you’re not so nice, either, Mr. Smarty Pants, charging all the kids in the neighborhood a penny to hear me talk.”

  “You just want your share, don’t you?”

  Emma was put out. She was losing an argument that she didn’t even understand, and now she felt that Ed was making fun of her. “Right, you nigger,” she yelled, and jumped off the teeter- totter quickly, banging him hard on the ground.

  Ed was three years older and many pounds heavier than Emma. Before she’d gone three steps he’d caught her by the arm, and now he was sitting on her stomach. He told her she could eat her words or eat the grass he held in his right hand.

  “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Emma was not going to give up.

  She ate the grass.

  Later, lying in a twin bed with her little cousin Sally, who was asleep, Emma whispered across to Ed, “Do your parents ever talk about me?”

  “Sure, they talk about you all the time. They say you’re a pain in the ass.”

  Emma giggled. “No, really.”

  “Yeah. They’ve said lots of times how they’d like to see you and Uncle Jakey. And your mom.”

  “Do they ever say I’m a mistake?”

  “What do you mean, a mistake?”

  Emma shrugged. “I don’t know. Something I heard my parents say.”

  “You probably didn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand lots they say. And they never answer my questions.”

  “All parents are like that. They make you feel weird. Like you’re adopted. Or wish you were. They speak a foreign language when you’re around. Sometimes mine really do—they think we don’t understand any Yiddish.”

  “What?”

  “Yiddish. Your dad must speak it, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he grew up with my mom, silly. You know, Yiddish, Jews.”

  “Jews?” Emma whispered.

  Ed was quiet for a minute.

  “Emma, don’t you know you’re Jewish?”

  “I am not!”

  “You are! Your dad is. That makes you Jewish, too.”

  “No,” Sally spoke up from between them, awake now, or maybe she’d never been asleep. “Not if your mom’s not. Your mom isn’t, is she?”

  They whispered for a long time after that, their words tossing and turning, and finally fell asleep after exchanging promises of visits and letters. Emma dozed off with Ed and Sally’s faces in her mind, then plummeted into a dream where the Green Skeleton waited.

  But this time he was friendly. He came into the front of the store just as she entered through the door in the back looking for a Hershey bar, and before she could let out a good scream he bowed deeply at the waist just like her Grandfather Isidore and offered her his green glowing hand.

  “May I have the pleasure of this dance?” he asked.

  From somewhere came the strains of “The Blue Danube,” and he slowly twirled her out the door of the store, across the squares of her hopscotch that she could see in the moonlight traced on the sidewalk, and down the bank of the canal. Blackberry brambles caught at the hem of her nightgown, but he gently untangled her and brushed them away.

  “There’s someone who would like to talk with you,” the Green Skeleton said, and then he swung her forward as if he were releasing her into the arms of another partner. And he was, for she flew into the embrace of Marcus, the tall shy colored boy who had caught her arm and kept her from slipping into the canal that day it rained—Marcus, who lived just beyond Skeleton Hill.

  “So nice to see you this evening,” Marcus said, speaking right up, as if he weren’t shy at all, as if he weren’t colored.

  “Well, it’s nice to be here,” Emma replied, pretending there was nothing at all unusual about dancing on the surface of the canal’s green water in the arms of a black boy. “How ar
e you this evening?”

  “Why, I’m just fine. I’m just pleased as punch to be here. But there’s something I have to tell you.” He dipped her and whirled her. The surface of the water was like glass, shiny but not wet.

  “What’s that, Marcus?” He’s going to tell me that he’s Jewish, she thought in her dream. She gave him her best smile.

  But he didn’t say that at all. He said, “I don’t like it when you say ‘nigger.’ It hurts me.” Whereupon his black skin became transparent and she could see, right through his white skeleton, his broken heart.

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Good.” He smiled a brilliant smile, his teeth white in his black face, silver in the moonlight. “I knew, Emma, that you would understand.”

  She nodded, and they smiled into each other’s eyes, and the music swelled and then the surface of the water sparkled with stars which lifted like a flying carpet and they danced up up up into the sky, far far away from the canal and West Cypress.

  5

  West Cypress

  1961

  Never again, Emma had vowed to herself at fourteen. Never again would she travel with her momma and daddy across the Coupitaw Parish line.

  Nor would she eat one more Vienna sausage in the backseat or sleep one more night in the car. Not one more time would she hang her head out the window like a collie dog, her heart lurching with hunger and sorrow, as Rosalie drove right on past hamburger stands, Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons as if Emma had suggested they stop at the Taj Mahal.

  So it was “No, thanks,” she’d said at sixteen when Rosalie suggested New Mexico. “I’d just as soon stay home.”

  That was a lie, and both of them knew it. As long as she could remember, Emma had sat beside her daddy and looked at color pictures of faraway places he wanted to go to.

  Emma wanted to go, too. But when she closed her eyes and watched herself waving goodbye, her parents were never in the picture. Sometimes there was a handsome man by her side. Or she was walking up a gangplank alone. A third version featured her jumping into a car with a sidekick like Dean Moriarty in a book she’d read, On the Road. Could girls do that? Just pick up and run away, driving to see what they could see? She didn’t know, but she’d sure like to find out. She’d die if she had to spend the rest of her life in West Cypress.

  Now Emma was seventeen, and on this bright November morning here they were, the three of them, in a car once again, a square white Studebaker heading west on Highway 80, breaking Emma’s vow. But this time was different. Emma was driving. At her right elbow Rosalie sniffled into a monogrammed handkerchief. In the backseat Jake and a rolling green thermos fought it out for territory across an imaginary line.

  It wasn’t just Emma’s driving that made this trip different. For blazing the way ahead of them was the rear end of a long black hearse. It in turn was trailing Emma’s cousin J.D. sitting tall behind the wheel of his state-trooper car. Jake could rest his mind on the subject of navigation; Sergeant J.D. Tarley’s head was filled with maps.

  Straggling behind them like so many biddy chickens in a gaggle of cars and pickup trucks were those of the Norris clan who had attended one or the other, or in some cases both, of Virgie Norris’s funerals during the past two days. Now the cortège was passing through the rolling piney hills that began at the Coupitaw, headed for Sweetwell and Virgie’s funeral number three.

  Some of the Norrises hadn’t started out from West Cypress that morning, but from fifty miles farther north in Pearl Bank. That was where two days earlier they’d held Virgie’s funeral number one.

  “Well, I hope Nancy’s happy now that she’s made us all late. It’s bad enough to keep all those folks in Sweetwell waiting three days. They’re probably standing on one foot and then the other.” Rosalie was twisting her handkerchief so hard that the monogram had disappeared.

  “Momma, I don’t think Aunt Nancy kept them in Pearl Bank on purpose. Aunt Flo said her kids overslept. Then the bacon burned, and two collar buttons just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Rosalie jerked her damp handkerchief to her face and dabbed at a fresh flow. “You taking her side now,” she cried. “I guess I could have expected that.”

  “Ro.” Jake tentatively placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder, but she pulled away smartly as if she’d been burned. “For the lovamike,” he exploded.

  The blood rose in Jake’s face. He shoved himself back into the plastic seat. They were all crazy, he thought. Well, what did you want from Baptists? Jews, sensible people like himself, buried their dead, sat shivah and mourned for seven days, and it was over. But not Southern Baptists and not Norrises and not in West Cypress, Louisiana.

  Now Rosalie was picking up an old thread of grief as if it were a stitch she’d been worrying and had for a moment dropped. “I knew it, I always knew it ever since we were kids.”

  “Now, Momma.” There was a warning then in Emma’s voice, but she kept her eyes on the road. She didn’t need to look to see whether Rosalie was crying. The tears had been falling like spring rain determined to flood for four days now, ever since the word had first come that Grandma Virgie had passed on. She didn’t need to listen either. She knew what was coming next.

  “Momma always loved her the most because she was the baby.”

  “Now, you know that’s not true,” Emma said.

  Rosalie ignored her and went on. It was her story. She’d tell it her way and as many times as she liked.

  “Virgie loved you, Ro,” Jake tried once more from the back seat, making a special effort, like putting on his dark suit. It occurred to Emma that sometimes her daddy didn’t say this many words in a month.

  “But not like she did Nancy,” Rosalie insisted. “She was the favorite. She got sent to school.”

  “Because they had more money by the time she was grown. You’ve said that yourself,” Emma countered, wondering why she tried.

  Rosalie shook her head and, giving up on the handkerchief, fumbled for a tissue in her black plastic purse. “Nobody sent me to school. I had to work for everything in this world I ever got.”

  “Christ!” Emma exclaimed. The taillights of the hearse in front of them had popped on, signaling danger. Emma pumped the brake and shot a quick look behind.

  They didn’t call Highway 80 Old Bucket of Blood for nothing. It was a two-lane roller coaster built by that honorable thief and friend of the common man, Huey P. Long. Like Huey it specialized in making mountains out of molehills and throwing blind curves.

  Emma checked her rearview mirror again. She could see the whole Norris clan rear-ending one another until they were all squashed together in a great ancestral jam.

  “Be careful!” Rosalie said, pulling out of her grief to deal with the here and now. “You always drive too fast.” She paused a moment. “And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  Emma glanced at the speedometer. She was doing thirty-five.

  What can we talk about to change the subject, she wondered, before I have a screaming hissy fit?

  Being a Southern girl, she put her mind on automatic pilot and the niceties fell out of her mouth. “It was a beautiful funeral, Momma. I know Grandma would have been proud.”

  “She did look pretty in her powder blue, didn’t she? It went so nice with her silver hair.”

  “And that white casket,” Emma added with a measure of pride. She had picked out the coffin, Rosalie being too nervous to choose, afraid they’d sell her something over the limits of the paid-up burial policy.

  “I bet Nancy told everybody at the funeral in Pearl Bank that she made the arrangements.”

  “But, Momma, they know. They know you’ve been paying for that policy for years.”

  “I guess so. I just hope they appreciate all the trouble I went to.” Rosalie snapped her purse shut in exclamation.

  The car was silent for a few moments. Green pines, sweet gums, oaks floated by. A bunch of brown-and-white dairy cows clustered, staring over a fence into the highwa
y as if they were counting trucks or had something on their minds.

  Then Emma’s thoughts leapfrogged over the top of the long hearse up ahead to the highway patrol car with its blue light flashing. She could imagine J.D. with his sunglasses on and his black nonregulation curls escaping from his wide-brimmed brown hat. J.D. looked more like Elvis Presley than any man she’d ever known. Her boyfriend, Bernie, had almost the same black hair, but not those eyes, not that mouth. That was what made her shiver when she thought about J.D., the curve, just like Elvis’s, of that wide mouth.

  “Do you think she minded all this moving around?”

  “Who?” Emma had to drag her mind back into the car.

  “Momma,” Rosalie answered.

  “You mean leaving Sweetwell for Pearl Bank to live with Aunt Nancy and Big J.D.?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, which she was trying to keep on the rear end of the hearse, Emma saw Rosalie shake her head.

  “No, I don’t mean that. I mean shipping her body from Nancy’s to Cypress and the funeral parlor for the fixing, then back to Pearl Bank for that service Nancy insisted on.”

  “Those were her last friends there in Pearl Bank,” Jake said, but Rosalie turned and shot him a look that made him hush.

  “And then all the way back to Cypress for my funeral. Now over to Sweetwell, where I guess somebody’s got to say a few more words before we put her in the ground beside Pa. Well,” said Rosalie, dabbing at her eyes, “I hope Nancy’s happy with all this running around.”

  “At least the weather’s cool.” Emma was just making conversation, trying to lead Rosalie in another direction. “At least it’s not August.” And then she fanned herself with one hand at the thought of three open-casket funerals in that heat when dogs lay motionless for days and tomatoes burst open by themselves sitting out in the sun.

  But Rosalie would not be redirected from the worn path she was traveling on. “You know, I wouldn’t have minded so much if Nancy had taken good care of her, seeing as how she was getting all of Momma’s Social Security.”

  “For Pete’s sakes,” Jake said, still not having learned his lesson. “Nancy didn’t starve her to death.”