by Dorothy West
Cleo knew she had better not ask anybody anything. The thing to do was to keep on going down this ruined street of rotting frame houses until she found one with some distinguishing mark, a clean curtain or a swept walk, that would set it apart from the others.
In the middle of the block she saw it. A two-storied, flat-roofed, snow-white house, with open green shutters and sparkling windows. She pulled at the doorbell and heard its muted tinkle. In a moment or so the door opened. A round-faced, gray-haired colored maid stared at her without expression.
Cleo felt a quick resentment that this sporting woman could flaunt a maid. Like enough the maid had had to teach the mistress manners.
She said coldly, “Will you tell your madam that a lady” — the word was underlined — “wishes to see her? It’s a very urgent matter.”
The woman hesitated, then stepped aside to let her enter. “Will you wait here, please?” She left Cleo in the long reception hall and started up the stairs.
Again Cleo had a moment of wonder that this West End Duchess had found a colored woman willing to work for her. Cleo’s friends who could afford maids had never been able to get colored help. The experienced domestics from the South could not be induced to work for people of color, feeling a natural embarrassment at the scorn to be found in their own stratum that they would use the back doors of a social group who could not use the front doors of their former employers.
In the employ of this upper colored class were the “green girls,” the young, untutored immigrant girls who held their jobs until their more sophisticated countrymen explained the insurmountable distinction between a man who looked white and a man who was white.
There were only twenty-odd colored families who counted themselves the élite. Since most of that number could not afford maids, there was not really a servant problem.
While she waited impatiently, Cleo became aware of the graceful Chippendale pieces in the hall and the darkly glowing mahogany in the long parlor and dining room beyond. A magnificent grand piano engulfed a corner of the parlor. Cleo yearned to own it. She had been working on Bart a year to buy Judy an upright. All nice children started piano lessons at five. She sighed. For a moment she pictured this beautiful furniture in the high-ceilinged rooms of her new house. She knew that their cost was far beyond anything Bart would consider paying for tables and chairs to eat at and sit in, which depreciated in value the more you ate and sat.
The maid returned. “Will you follow me, please.”
They reached the upper hall. The maid murmured, “The lady.” Cleo crossed the threshold of a charming morning room.
A woman rose from behind a tea-table set with exquisitely patterned china and surveyed Cleo quietly, with a still, unrevealing smile. She was ash-blond. Her imperial eyes were blue. Cleo was thoroughly disconcerted, for she was unprepared for the dignity of the West End Duchess. She had come for a fishwives’ brawl, and the woman before her was patrician. There was breeding in every fragile bone.
“Won’t you sit down?” the Duchess said.
Cleo sat down dumbly, though she had meant to stand, as befitting her position as a man’s wife when faced with a sporting woman. But despite herself, she was impressed by this woman’s superior status.
The Duchess appraised her. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
Cleo braced herself for the next observation, the common knowledge of Negroes forewarning her that the Duchess would make some casual mention of her servants, with the subtle intention of reminding Cleo that all colored people were in the same category.
Cleo said lightly, “You are not entirely a stranger to me. My cook has mentioned you often, but, of course, she may know you only by reputation.”
The imperial eyes were veiled. The delicate chin lifted a little. “I cannot believe that you have come to exchange backstairs gossip. May I ask you who you are and why you are here?”
Cleo could feel herself getting mad. Did this outcast from her own kind consider herself too good to waste her expensive time on a colored woman? Still she could not unleash the hot words that would reduce her to a level beneath the dignity of this Duchess.
“I’m Mrs. Bart Judson. I’ve come on behalf of Miss Althea Binney. Her father is dying.”
The Duchess said quietly, almost reprovingly, “You cannot mean that. I am seeing him tonight.”
“Not after the stroke he had this morning. He’ll never live to see daybreak. You might as well make up your mind you’ve seen him for the last time.”
The Duchess said witheringly: “Since Althea could not face me with such a grisly fabrication, I am sure she must admire the boldness which enables you to do so. You may tell Carter Binney that I would have more respect for him if he had chosen a less unscrupulous way to send word that he is dead to me.”
“It was God’s way,” said Cleo furiously. “God’s way of punishing that old fool for getting mixed up with your kind of trash. I never told a lie in my life, and I wouldn’t perjure myself for you. When they put Carter Binney in the ground, you go tell the police he was buried alive, and see how long it takes them to cart you off to the booby hatch.”
There was a pause, and Cleo’s angry breathing filled it. Her green eyes blazed. After a little the Duchess said painfully, “I believe you now. It is God’s way of punishing me for wanting Carter Binney.”
Cleo lost complete control of her temper. She jumped to her feet and flung herself into that bitter, unending, secret war between white and colored women.
“Don’t fool yourself!” she shouted. “God’s forgotten you’re on earth. It’s the Devil who’s licking his lips over you. And you’ve been a good disciple. I know why you hated Carter Binney. You couldn’t stay out of bed with him, and you hated him instead of yourself. Well, you’ve got him lying at death’s door with not a penny to bury him, and not a penny to leave behind. There’s no more damage you can do. Get out of my race and stay out.”
The Duchess said, out of her suffering, “It is my race, too.”
Cleo’s mouth fell open. She said, in a soft, incredulous voice, “God have mercy, you’re not all white?”
“My mother was colored.”
Cleo sank back on her chair, and wished for her fan. “It wasn’t your skin and hair that fooled me. We come every color under the sun. But the way you carry yourself, I thought you were born on Beacon Hill.”
The Duchess said, without expression, “My father was.”
Cleo thought of Thea, who had come to her for help, Thea with the tear stains on her pretty face. And Thea’s image paled a little. Nothing tremendous had ever happened to Thea except her father’s taking a fit because a born lady wanted to marry him. All of Cleo’s zest for life, her insatiable love of conspiracy were roused to search behind the imperial eyes.
“If I had known you were colored, I wouldn’t have hit you from so many sides. If I had known you were such a lady, I wouldn’t have come for a fight at all. I never heard of you until an hour ago, and all I heard was one side of the story. There has to be another side. And you have a right to tell me yours.”
Her eyes were gray again, and very gentle. Her voice was tender and persuasive. The Duchess felt her warm sympathy, and was drawn to it. And Cleo’s sympathy was real. In this moment she wanted nothing more than to know about this lovely woman. Her whole intensity was directed to that end. The power of her personality was like a tongue of fire that ignored locked doors and penetrated whatever reticences might stand in the way of her passion to probe the lives of other women and tell them how to live them.
“May I give you tea?” the Duchess asked.
Cleo smiled radiantly. “I’d love a cup of tea while we talk.”
The Duchess poured. This was her first tea party. She found a thin amusement in the fact that she was pouring for Mrs. Bart Judson. She knew of Bart Judson and his wholesale business. She had never invited him to her gaming tables because he had nothing she wanted. She did not want money. The men who lost at her roulette wheel were th
e husbands of the women she wanted around her tea-table.
They were the women whose impregnable positions had been established by Boston birth and genteel breeding. They acknowledged no more than a hundred best families in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Their lives were narrowly confined to a daily desperate effort to ignore their racial heritage. They did not consider themselves a minority group. The Irish were a minority group, the Jews, the Italians, the Greeks, who were barred from belonging by old country memories, accents, and mores. These gentlewomen felt that they had nothing in common except a facial resemblance. Though they scorned the Jew, they were secretly pleased when they could pass for one. Though they were contemptuous of the Latins, they were proud when they looked European. They were not too dismayed by a darkish skin if it was counterbalanced by a straight nose and straight hair that established an Indian origin. There was nothing that disturbed them more than knowing that no one would take them for anything but colored.
It was a bitter truth, to be discussed only in special groups, that a sporting woman in the West End was, by these standards, the most beautiful colored woman in Boston.
The Duchess passed Cleo a cup of tea. Cleo sipped it with her little finger crooked carefully. She wondered what Mr. Judson would say if he could see her sipping tea with the Duchess. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference to him that she carried herself like a lady. She had passed money across a green table. She had entertained married men. Mr. Judson believed there were good women and bad women and no in-between. That was what made it so easy to pull the wool over his eyes.
Cleo put her cup down and assumed an attentive expression. It was getting on to four. In an hour Mr. Judson would be starting home for supper. Men were nothing but stomach and the other thing. It would be a happy day for women if both could be cut out.
“Tell me about yourself,” said Cleo richly.
The imperial eyes widened and darkened. The Spode cups cooled. The Duchess gave a little sigh and began her story.
“Althea Binney’s mother and mine were foster sisters. My grandfather married her grandmother. Their marriage gave back their children the parents they had lost. Grandfather was butler for a Beacon Hill bachelor, who had never married because the only women to whom he would have given his name bored him in every way.
“Grandfather died in his employ. And this man, Thad Tewksbury, came to the funeral and saw my mother for the first time. To him she looked exotic. Her mother had been Irish.”
Cleo remembered a tintype that she had seen in Thea’s album, a regal brown man, an austere-faced woman stiffly corseted, and two little girls with their arms entwined, one as lovely as dawn. That lovely child had had a white mother, an Irish maid who had married a colored butler. And she, this immigrant Irisher, had obligingly died at her daughter’s birth, thus removing herself from the circle of the colored élite, in which her peasant background would have been embarrassing. No one Cleo knew in the North admitted to having a white relation of the lower classes. When such a bride was chosen, it was considered very poor taste to discuss her humble origins. Her marriage had elevated her to her husband’s higher station. White antecedence was only exploited when the daughter of bluebloods eloped with her coachman.
The Duchess said: “Thad made my mother his mistress. He defiled her the day he sent his carriage to fetch her to his house. The coachman said it was some matter concerning her continuing in Normal School. With her father dead, her stepmother could not support her while she finished her teacher’s training. Her stepmother helped her dress in her best to go to see Thad Tewksbury. They thought it was important that she impress him with her neat appearance.
“My mother never reached the house on Beacon Hill. She was driven here. Thad was waiting. He showed her this house, and said he had bought it with the intention of giving it to her father, whom he had planned to retire because of his failing health. My mother was too ignorant of the world to know that no one would furnish a house in such style for a servant. She supposed that Thad knew no better than to buy the best. He gave my mother the deed to this house. He gave her a bank book. And she wept with gratitude. For one hour of her life she loved him: the hour they sat and talked during dinner. For a caterer came, and they celebrated his investment in her teaching career. My mother had never touched wine in her life, but she did not want to offend Thad by refusing the champagne he had ordered especially for her. And after the first glass, she never knew how many times it was refilled.
“When she waked, it was morning. The clothes she had worn were nowhere. She opened a closet door and found a dozen expensive costumes. But she knew she could not go home in them. She could not go home at all. Her stepmother would never believe that she had been innocent of Thad’s intentions. She was a fallen woman. She looked at herself in the mirror, and saw her sin in her face, and did not know it was mostly the after-effect of champagne. She was too ashamed to walk out of this house, and sat and waited in a fine gown for Thad to come and tell her what to do.”
Through the first years of Thad’s fantastic indulgence, and forever after, Corinne never stopped regretting her acquiescence, or feeling self-pity. To the listening child in the fine French frocks her mother’s nostalgic stories of the stern simplicity of her prim upbringing became the pattern of all her thinking.
At six the silver-haired child began to pray God to turn her a color that would make her unmistakably a member of her mother’s race. The servants were her only contact with her kind. They were resentful that she and Corinne, without lifting a finger, lived in a luxury they could never hope to attain, no matter how long they labored in God’s vineyard. They showed their resentment in their manner, which was just a shade under scorn, and were deliberately indifferent to the child, never stopping to listen to her prattle, never permitting her to play around them, speaking sharply whenever she strayed across the threshold of their privacy.
Her nurse was a pious old Frenchwoman, who loved her because she was a small innocent, and had forgotten that a child of sin should be treated as if that child had committed it. It was a natural thing for the child to love her in return. Seeing this, Corinne, her pride in her past increasing as the years made her return to it more remote than the moon, taught her daughter to dismiss the servants’ churlishness as envy of her class superiority. The child dreamed of her mother’s world of remembering as a paradise which some day she might enter.
Corinne’s New England conscience deplored the life that she had grown too indolent to leave. She did not want her daughter to grow up with the belief that a wealthy white protector was worth a colored woman’s loss of caste. For there was no city to which a notorious woman of color could escape where her reputation would not follow her. The special Negro groups were too small and too interlocked by marriage and old friendships for an aspirant to seek to disclaim her past.
As the years advanced, and passion slaked in Thad, the habit of Corinne’s hearth grew stronger in him. He wanted to be with her, for she was his wife, in the way that a woman’s complete dependency makes a man cherish her in spite of himself. She was not amusing. She sat too quietly with her interminable tatting, and her little sad smile, and her velvet eyes with their veiled reproach. He could not stay away. Yet the dull evenings were unendurable, with Corinne occasionally consenting to a game of checkers, which she played with an exasperating lack of skill.
So it was that Thad got in the way of bringing in a friend or two to while away the night with cards. Other friends pressed him for invitations. To them it seemed an enormous adventure to see the inside of a colored concubine’s house, and watch her walk among them with her sadness and disdain and her little gold box, in which she deposited her share of this new sin with imperceptible cleansing of the fingertips.
CHAPTER 11
THE DUCHESS’S EYES MET CLEO’S. She gave a little wavering smile and said: “I was sent to a convent in Canada when I was eight. This house was virtually a gambling house, and my mother wanted me out of it. I lived
under the simplest and strictest régime in the convent. The prim little girls in their plain dark frocks, the gentle Sisters, the beauty and mystery of the Mass, and never any men except the priests in their covering cassocks. I could not bear the thought of leaving. I began to prepare myself to take the vows.”
For a moment Cleo felt a shock along her spine. In this dishonored setting, so far removed from a celibate’s cell, sat a woman of the world, whose pale gold hair was unshorn and unhidden, whose Paris gown was hardly suggestive of sackcloth, whose hands nightly counted paper money that had neither the feel nor the yield of told beads. Yet Cleo, who had not been able to see the Duchess as anything less, was incapable of belittling her piety, too. Her earnestness outreached derision. Her spirit disavowed her flesh. Cleo, who felt that she understood women, could not find the niche in which to fit her, or could not reach high enough above her comprehension.
“I wrote my mother of my intention,” the Duchess was saying. “She had not been raised a Catholic because her stepmother had considered the Pope a foreigner. My letter was never answered. Instead, the Mother Superior received a telegram instructing her to send me home at once. I thought my mother wanted to plead with me to remain in the world. And all the way home I went over in my mind how I would plead with her to be reconciled to my leaving it.
“But I had not been sent for because of my letter. I’m sure my mother dismissed it as a young girl’s daydream. She was dying, and the one thing she wanted had become an obsession that made everything else seem frivolous. She wanted to die in the world in which her father’s name had been a proud one. My marriage to someone securely inside it would sanction her reacceptance. Thad Tewksbury had been dead six months. He had left her considerable money. But this house was still open to his friends. That was one of the things that aggravated her illness. Her doctor had ordered a complete rest in bed. But my mother believed that the more she could add to my dowry, the easier it would be to buy Cole Hartnett for me.”
