Mom paused. She looked down at me. You wanna go back, don’t you?
I shrugged. I dunno. Maybe.
If you do, I will support you in that. Lord knows things haven’t been great here. But you must understand that no matter how difficult life has been for us these last seven years, this is nothing compared to what it would have been like for us had we stayed. She paused. There comes a point in life, Huey, where the question isn’t so much What should you do? but What options do you have?
We crossed Fifth Avenue. It was mostly overcast, but a sliver of sun was peeking through the cloud cover, so low on the horizon it lit the bellies of a flock of pigeons gliding overhead. Mom took my hand and said that when I was a baby, she truly believed the Fairchild family orchard would one day be mine, but that the older she got, she came to realize that had never been in the cards. She shook her head at the dead leaves, stiff and curled, tumbling down the sidewalk. Mom and I entered the park at Ninety-Sixth Street and followed the first shrub-lined path we came to. We strolled through a patch of stinky ginkgos and mixed in with the ten-speeds, and the large-framed Mary Poppins bikes with their long fenders and baskets, and the tourists strolling about snapping pictures. We stopped in front of two jugglers tossing candlepins back and forth. Mom put her spare change in their cap, and we continued on past folksy guitar strummers belting out a protest song. Mom waxed philosophical about how much had changed in the last few years—how I’d gone from being a little boy to someone who would soon be a young man, and how the world around us was changing so much from one day to the next. She slung an arm over my shoulder and cursed Johnson for having lowered the draft age, but told me not to worry. Not in a million years would she let me fight that man’s fight.
I stopped. Jesus Christ. Do I look like some long-haired lotus-eating freak? I wanna go and fight!
Over my dead body! I will not let that man get his hands on you. You hear me? If I wanted you dead I’d kill you myself. Christ, Huey. Don’t be a chump! When are you going to realize that we win just by getting along? And the assholes can’t even do that!
A mime was doing his routine in front of the zoo. He put his fingers to his lips and looked in our direction as we stood there bickering like an old married couple. We exited the park at Fifty-Ninth Street. I stood on the corner, staring at the perky breasts on the statue of some chick holding a fruit basket across the street. Mom tugged my arm and told me to cheer up. She said she knew just the thing to make me feel better and dragged me downstairs into the subway. We took the R train one stop and got off at Lexington Avenue. Mom took off her shawl, and we popped into Bloomingdale’s. On our way up the escalator, she picked at the pilling on my blazer and fussed over a tiny hole at my left elbow and told me that I was in desperate need of a new one. I lifted my arm to demonstrate that it was only noticeable when I raised my hand with a question.
Mom didn’t think that funny. Neither had she appreciated having to have it dry cleaned after I’d fished it out of the garbage can that day. Her boss at the dry cleaners, Mister Sanders, had charged her; he was still upset with her for having reduced her hours on account of Missus Blumenthal demanding more and more of her time. Mom looked down at me and said that even if it annoyed her having to shell out three bucks of her hard-earned money to pay for the dry cleaning, it was still worth it. She started in about how important it was for me to look top notch. Whether I knew it or not, people judged me by how I looked. I shrugged and told her that it wasn’t like I was fooling anyone.
It didn’t matter to Mom that Vernonblood, Lichenberger, and Bilmore all knew where I lived or that Zukowski was the only one who didn’t seem to care. She looked at me in the prudish way she does when she’s annoyed and reminded me that it was still worth spending a little extra to get the very best. What bugs me is that Mom humps away day in and day out just to buy me the stuff rich kids have, never realizing that they’re dyed-in-the-wool blue-blooded boys and not just some measly peanut farmer’s son, which she still manages to talk about like it’s a big deal. She doesn’t care if me having at least some of the stuff kids with nannies, au pairs, and chauffeurs have comes at the cost of us spending more time together, because the second I mentioned Dad and peanuts in the same breath, she started rambling on about how she had a mind to petition for back pay for all the work she’d done for him, because she should have known all along that she’d never get one red cent out of him for all her trouble keeping his books, never mind get to be a Fairchild, and when were people going to start calling her by her correct family name, anyway? She needed to start correcting people, because she was a different person than she had been back when she let it slide because it didn’t seem to be worth the trouble. She was sick and tired of all the people from my school calling her Missus Fairchild all the time, when she was not a Fairchild and never would be a Fairchild because that had probably never been in the cards either. She knew that now. She only wished she’d known it then.
I snapped my fingers in her face and told her to get a grip. What the heck are you talking about?
You wouldn’t understand if I told you.
Well, you lost me on our way past the third floor. Enough with the ranting, Mama!
Oh, hush.
There’s no point arguing with her when she gets like that. Besides, it was too late. She’d already received a two-week advance from Missus Blumenthal to help with the cost of some unexpected lawyer’s fees and the special psychiatric evaluations. We got off on the fourth floor and headed for the men’s department. I took a seat in the wingback chair they keep in the back by the tailor’s station and started to swing my feet back and forth while pretending that I was wearing a smoking jacket and puffing on a pipe like Alistair Cooke. I love that show.
Mom had been up late, taking care of the twins for half the night. She was standing in front of a three-way mirror, trying to rub out the dark circles under her eyes, going on about how the truth was that Dad always had been a hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil kind of guy. And in a way, maybe she had been, too. But she was a much different person from who she was back then. And no, maybe New York hadn’t turned out like all the fancy stories she’d been told, but we’d make something of it still. We just needed to give it more time. Where there were second chances, there was hope. And New York seemed to be giving us a second chance. Mom flashed me a smile—the kind that can light up a ballroom, which to my mind, was just another New York City abstraction that I had never been to. Right up there with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the Apollo Theater. Anyway, even if you can kind of tell that life has been a little rough on her, she’s still the most beautiful woman in the world. Honestly, I don’t know how she does it.
An older gentleman in a double-breasted suit and comb-over strolled over and asked if he could be of service. Mom asked after a Mister Castiglioni. The man raised an eyebrow, nodded his head slightly, and said, Speaking, madam.
Mom informed Mister Castiglioni that he came highly recommended from Carol Blumenthal. Which seemed to make an impression. Mister Castiglioni checked his watch and then escorted us into a fitting room. Mom handed him the blazer she’d pulled from a rack. Mister Castiglioni recognized the crest on my lapel, complimented me on my academic accomplishment, and instructed me to kindly change into the one he was presently holding open for me.
I slipped my right arm in quickly. The infection where the bone had poked through the skin had left an ugly scar, but the worst part was how crooked it had healed. I’ll never forget the look on Mom’s face when the doctor at the New York Hospital cut off the cast and saw my bow-shaped forearm. She was as shocked as he was. There she was, planning to celebrate the occasion with Chinese takeout, and she turned irate with those two big bags of food in her hands. I could tell that she wanted to throw them, but of course she couldn’t waste food. She’d joked on our way up the elevator to the pediatric orthopedics floor, telling me how it’d be a quick in and out and that of course the C
hinese food would still be hot by the time we got home. She had no idea that my arm was going to end up looking like a corkscrew—that’s what she’d called it. Dad had never told her that he’d foregone the procedure that would have corrected that issue without having consulted her.
Dr. Cohen, who had no idea about any of that, asked if it had happened while we were on vacation in Mexico; he’d attended a conference in the Yucatán once and could sympathize. The Mayan ruins in Chichén Itzá were amazing, but you didn’t want to end up in a hospital there. When Mom grunted and said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It happened right here. In the United States, Dr. Cohen looked both ways and said under his breath that he didn’t necessarily advise it, but judging by what he saw, she could probably sue for malpractice. This is egregious, ma’am. There isn’t a judge out there who wouldn’t be sympathetic to this.
Mom didn’t care about the money. She wanted my arm to be straight—which Dr. Cohen explained was resolutely impossible. Took Mom three weeks before she was able to climb down from the angry tree. I learned that term from my court-appointed social worker, Tabetha, who urged me to visualize myself climbing out of a tree next time I got irate. Said it helped to trigger something calming in the brain. I asked if it could be any kind of tree I wanted, and she said sure, why not? I settled on a palm tree. They seemed pretty damn near impossible to get out of. Long story short, Dr. Cohen said there was a fifty-fifty chance that I would regain sensation in my pinky. It’s been seven years now, and it still just kind of hangs there, useless.
All this is to say that my bent-to-shit forearm got a raised eyebrow from Mister Castiglioni. Thankfully, he didn’t feel the need to comment. Instead, he blithely snapped at the blazer’s hem with his fingers and, with pins in his mouth, said,
Whose kid?
My eyes fell to the floor.
The Fairchilds’.
I don’t know that family. What business are they in?
Peanuts.
Mister Castiglioni raised an eyebrow, impressed. Peanuts? I once had a customer who was in peanuts. Now, this was a great many years ago, of course. I think his son went into politics. Or maybe it was his nephew. Anyway, he used to come in all the time, trying on some double-breasted number, and would always talk about his boy. I think he was doing some type of missionary work for the UN, if I’m not mistaken. Who knows? Might be a congressman now, for all I know. Any relation?
I waited for Mom to correct him, but she just said that she wouldn’t know and otherwise let him believe whatever he wanted. After all her talk. I was starting to sense that maybe everything had changed and nothing had changed. Mister Castiglioni finished with the chalk marks and poking me with pins and informed Mom that it would be ready at four thirty, then bid us to kindly give his regards to the dear Missus Blumenthal.
Mom pulled me in close, and on our way out of the heavy glass doors, I closed my eyes and wished the day to last forever. With all the time we had together when we lived back in Akersburg, I’d never once gone for a stroll with her down Main Street. What made strolling down Lexington arm in arm with Mom magical for me was that no one bumping into us knew or cared whether or not my folks were married, or why they’d split, or what color they were or how much money they made. We strolled down Lexington like two kindred spirits and would have done it together every day if it wasn’t for the fact that she practically lived at the Blumenthals’.
I didn’t care if all the men in business suits shoving their elbows and knocking their briefcases into me as they passed assumed she was my nanny. And honestly, I don’t think Mom did, either. It was still nice. As we walked down the busy street, weaving through the hustle and bustle of midtown pedestrian traffic on a drab weekday afternoon, I thought that maybe the pickle I’d gotten myself into had something to do with the realization I’d had that it was better to be some run-of-the-mill, just-off-the-boat foreigner from Krakow, or wherever the hell Zukowski’s folks were from. They actually thought they were better than me. It didn’t matter to them that they hadn’t been off the boat fifteen years and were from some godforsaken far-flung place that I couldn’t even pronounce, or that they still spoke Polish around a dinner table packed with aunts and uncles and cousins while Missus Zukowski peeled potatoes barefoot in the kitchen of their split-level, stand-alone duplex out in Canarsie. None of that mattered. I mean, really? Does that kind of bullshit happen in other countries? Even the one they left?
Even if it were true that I’d only gotten to go to Claremont because I was colored, I didn’t exactly appreciate having my face rubbed in it. The worst part for me was that even if Zukowski knew better, the rest of his family hadn’t been here long enough to and didn’t understand about our delicate history of human bondage, and frankly, they could not have cared less. Missus Zukowski was too busy celebrating her son’s recent accomplishments in the land of opportunity to be bothered to give a shit about that. As far as her merry band of scorekeepers were concerned, the point totals spoke for themselves.
Zukowski’s family hadn’t been here for much longer than I’d been alive and had already achieved what had taken Mom ten generations. Trust me, none of that was lost on me. And none of that would have mattered, not one lousy bit, except for the fact that Zukowski’s enlightened worldview wasn’t enough to keep him from cashing in on the advantage unfairly conferred unto him when it mattered most. He had no problem using the color of his skin to curry favor with Suzie Hartwell when she came to both realize and resent that I’d misled her about mine. And yes, that pissed me off. I knew that what I’d done was wrong, but so was he. I was being mocked and maligned on a daily basis for having the gall to use the color of my skin to gain advantage where it concerned getting into Claremont, and here people like Zuk pulled shit like that all the time and weren’t even aware of it, much less feeling pangs of guilt about it.
Listen, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I was having a hard time, socially, those first few years at Claremont. I know that what grown-ups want to hear me say is that it’s a great time in our country’s history to have brown skin, what with a kid like me in school here and the nation on the mend now that we’ve got all that happened back in Akersburg behind us. But I was pissed. Tabetha has assured me that it’s okay if I come clean about the racism I’ve experienced at Claremont, that I can only bottle things up for so long before they just explode. Even if I’d gotten pretty good at ignoring it, when nigger was murmured anonymously under someone’s breath, it still hurt. I dunno. Maybe it was just that I no longer had an Evan around to absorb that particular shock.
Which is why I had no choice but to explain myself to Mom. I told her how devastating it felt when I saw Suzie Hartwell and Zukowski walk up the stands in the gymnasium and then sit together, arm in arm, at a pep rally. How I calmly made my way through the crowd and walked over to him and tapped him politely on the shoulder, and when he turned, I socked him one. Right in the teeth. I don’t know. Seeing the two of them together like that—it just triggered something ugly in me. I just sort of blew my top. I guess I just realized that having nothing in common but a lack of belonging is not enough to base a friendship on. I deserved better. My only regret was that I’d let Hamilton and Bilmore egg me on, which had me feeling like I was their chump. Of course I knew that guys like them just want to see a fight. I dunno. I guess I’d just finally reached a point where I didn’t care anymore. Didn’t matter that it took five years—they’d finally succeeded in getting me to behave the way they’d predicted I would all along. As they said, That’s just what niggers do. I looked up at Hamilton and Bilmore and said, Happy? and walked off with blood on my hands.
Mom stopped me in my tracks.
Oh my Lord. You didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t. Oh, no. You did? You did that? How did I not find out about that? Mister McGovern was wrong. It’s not a father figure you lack. It’s the father figure. You lack Jesus Christ in your life, son. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You do. I sense a black hole somewhere deep inside you—a very, very dark pla
ce. Absolutely, positively Godless, I’m afraid. Starting tomorrow, you’re going to start reading the Bible again. We’re going to start with Leviticus. I think that’ll be good for you. Every day. And cartoons be damned—you’re going to make time for church on Sundays. And not just on Christmas and Easter, either. Every week. You hear me? For crying out loud! Does his mother know about that?
The only answer that I could offer was a shrug. The truth was, I didn’t know. On our way across the street, the late-afternoon sun was shining a lustrous amber light between the tall buildings. Mom rubbed her hands together for warmth and cursed the cold and said how eight years sure was a long time to have cloudy judgment, and how Dad hadn’t given her one red cent for child support all these years, and how she was sick and tired of being nickel-and-dimed to death, and how people down there probably still don’t want people like them living together and now she hadn’t got a legal claim to any of it. Nothing. Imagine! Rights, my A-S-S. She wasn’t allowed to protect herself financially and here she was taking care of me all on her own and Dad never sent one red cent in any of those letters, and now he probably had some other woman doing his books for him. Mom gave a manic laugh, then stopped and snapped me around in the crosswalk right in the middle of Lexington Avenue.
You don’t think I heard her? What she said to you in the doorway of Mister McGovern’s office? I’ve been working around people like that for seven years, mister. And you don’t think I’ve heard that talk before? Don’t you believe it. Or seen the look of judgment on her face when she said it? Listen here. You have every bit as much right to be at Claremont as Ariel. Every single bit and then some. It’s like one man steals a house from another man, and we say, fine. The authorities find the man guilty and send him to jail, and we say justice is served. But his son gets to keep the house. Okay? In short order, the son has a child and decides that he wants a second house. Except now, the man who’s had his house stolen finds himself competing for a home loan with guess who—the thief’s son. Only the thief’s son has a house to offer up as collateral against a second mortgage, and the man with whom he’s competing for the loan does not. Now, the banker doesn’t care one way or the other about that first home. He only cares about getting his money back. And after all, the son didn’t steal the house that he lives in. His father did. So why should he be penalized unfairly? We all know that you can’t punish the son for the sins of the father. Which is why he gets to live in that first house. But I’ll be damned if he gets to use it to bootstrap his second home when there is still a man out there who has been robbed of his fair chance at his first! And I don’t care if Zukowski has nothing to do with the provenance of that first home, either. Because it was stolen, and they strolled into it like they’ve got the Midas touch, when all they’ve done is stumble upon a damned fire sale. Nothing more!
They Come in All Colors Page 33
