Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  And things had only got better at the Cosmos Club. The menu had included shrimp étouffée, jambalaya, pain perdu, and French champagne and American cake. The cake, made with organic flour and eggs and real butter, had glowed the palest yellow that isn’t white. It had been perfect. The groom’s cake had been a perfect full-scale replica of a backgammon board.

  As jeroboams of champagne had been drained, negritude had given way to creolization. Guests had danced and guzzled and snuck off to have their picture taken with the sign that proclaimed, MEMBERS AND THEIR MALE GUESTS ONLY. In this crowd that sign was an issue.

  When people recalled anything bad about the wedding they would recall the sign; then that, too, was forgotten when the Cosmos Club inducted its first woman. Mainly everyone recalled Abel replying “Absolutely,” not “I will,” when asked, “Do you take this woman?”

  To be dancing in the ballroom of the Cosmos Club on that Saturday afternoon in 1985 as Big Abel danced with his new daughter-in-law or as Abel danced with his new bride was to be convinced that Lyndon Johnson was the greatest president who had ever lived—that his dream of a Great Society had become a reality.

  The time for Abel and Hope to cut the cake had come almost too soon. Bride and groom had each taken a demure bite from a single slice on a glass plate. The recipe was from an earlier era, an era so far back that few present remembered—a time before hand mixers and measuring cups, from back when some women knew and loved their way around their kitchens and their homes, from back before the black South had been defeated. It was the kind of cake black women bake for their families on special occasions and never, no matter how well they might be paid, for the families of white women. It was an old recipe of the aunts.

  A few of the older ladies had wrapped their slice of cake up in their napkin, remembering being young women who had slept with a sliver of equally dense wedding cake beneath their pillow, hoping to see in dreams the face of the one they would one day love, men they had now put in their grave.

  Slipping a bit of Able and Hope’s cake onto their tongue or a slice into their purse, or a bit into their pocket, had been a moment to forgive the old dead Texan, the thirty-sixth president, who had begun his career with stuffed ballot boxes.

  Abel and Hope had walked (she in her going-away outfit, a green and black corduroy dress with a black hat complete with veil; he in a gray silk suit and patterned orange Hermès tie) toward the limousine that would whisk them off, getting pelted with birdseed. As they had folded themselves into the stretch Cadillac that would take them to the airport, they had looked good enough to stand atop any bright tiered cake.

  They had taken a ridiculously expensive first-class flight to Boston on a plane so small it had barely had a first-class section. The stewardess had poured them cheap champagne and announced the wedding over the loudspeaker. This, for Abel, had made the journey worth the price of the ticket.

  Mr. and Mrs. Abel Jones the third had spent the first night of their honeymoon at the Ritz, in the presidential suite, a large and then-shabby room with wonderful windows that had looked out onto their rosy future and the Boston Common.

  After love and breakfast they had lit out, as they’d put it, to see the territory. Which of them was Huck and which of them was Jim they didn’t bother to declare. Their raft was a rented green Porsche convertible.

  With the first picture Hope had ever seen of herself in the pages of the New York Times on her lap, Abel and his bride had headed for Martha’s Vineyard and for marriage.

  Abel had known that Hope had no real idea why they were honeymooning in New England. It wasn’t cheap, it wasn’t easy, and possibly it wasn’t romantic. Except it was romantic that she had let him completely plan the honeymoon, much as he had let her completely plan the wedding.

  He had intended to celebrate the conservative conventions; she had intended to celebrate his black beauty and brilliance.

  They didn’t know this. It was a honeymoon.

  THIRTEEN

  THE PIG FEET weren’t out yet, at Silver Sands, but Hope could smell them cooking. The people who didn’t have early jobs to get to but needed breakfast before breakfast stopped being served were starting to drift in. All but one of the tables were full; there was about to be a line. It was time to leave if Hope and Nicholas weren’t buying more food.

  They had a place to go. Hope still had a key to Abel’s old house. A large red painted-brick structure, it stood a stone’s throw from a gate of Fisk. Two stories tall, and it had five pillars, not out in the front, but off to the side. In the front it had a kind of bay window that jutted out in three sharp angles.

  Hope was pointing to the bay window as Nicholas fiddled with the key in the lock.

  “Abel was terrified of this bay window when he was a boy. He thought this was where the bomb would come in,” said Hope.

  “Like they bombed Z. Alexander Looby’s house?” asked Nicholas.

  “He told you about that?” asked Hope.

  “More than once,” said Nicholas.

  Now Hope was pointing to the much smaller house next door, a Victorian with a basketball court out back.

  “That’s where Waycross lived when he was at medical school.”

  Finally, the key turned and the door was opened. Inside the house, time had been slowed in about 1970 and had come to a halt in about 1980. Explaining that the home décor owed much to the pages of Southern Living in the seventies, Hope led Nicholas through the rooms as if she were taking him on a historic-house tour. Then she explained that Southern Living was a lifestyle magazine out of Birmingham, Alabama.

  Gesturing with an upturned palm, Nicholas suggested Hope take a seat on the parlor sofa, and she did. He sat beside her. “Is there any whiskey?” he asked, and she was up again making her way to the bar in the kitchen.

  Hope found a half-full bottle of Gentleman Jack and two jelly glasses. Then she joined Nicholas on the sofa. From the breast pocket of his jacket, he took out a stack of photographs and laid them down on the table as if he were playing eccentric solitaire, three rows of three.

  The pictures— photographs—were disturbing and familiar. Naked men, dogs, leashes, piles of bodies, simulated sex acts, a uniformed smiling soldier, hoods, framed in a neat white border.

  “Abu Ghraib?”

  “Abu Ghraib.”

  “What do they have to do with me?”

  “My question exactly.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  Hope hoped she was telling the truth. Seeing Nicholas pull the pictures out of his inside jacket pocket, seeing the images as photographs touched by fingertips, not beaming from a computer screen or glossy in a magazine or flat in a newspaper, brought the poses closer, alarmingly close. Seeing them on Abel’s cocktail table was painful. Seeing them after having listened so recently to Tess and Pinagrew talk about Abel and dogs it was especially painful.

  Right after the pictures from Abu Ghraib had been published, Hope had had to schedule extra sessions with her shrink. They hadn’t got very far and then she had lost interest. Her interest was returning.

  “I can’t know this, Nicholas,” said Hope.

  “Why?” asked Nicholas.

  “Ajay,” said Hope.

  Nicholas didn’t have an answer for this. He had thought of the question but he hadn’t thought of an answer.

  Nicholas took out his pack of cigarettes, Gauloises. As he tapped one out and started to light it, Hope pointed to the front door. She stacked up the pictures and handed them back to him. He slid them back into his breast pocket and headed for the front door. He had pushed her too hard and too quickly. He had forgotten how strong she was and how cold she could be. As if she could read his mind she said, “You’ve forgotten what a mama is.”

  Hope found her way up the stairs and into Abel’s room. All four walls were lined floor to ceiling with books. There was an extra-long single bed. At the foot of the bed was a desk. Beside the desk was a nightst
and. There was a closet with a mirror on the door. She lay down on Abel’s bed. The pillows smelled like him.

  She was surprised. She wondered how often Abel had come to the house. As she settled herself into Abel’s pillows, she felt herself growing intimate with the dead. She closed her eyes to intensify the feeling, then she opened her eyes to see what he had seen from his pillow. Hanging from a pushpin stuck in one of the bookcase shelves was a little plane, the plane she had made him—she didn’t remember exactly when—a replica of the one flown by Lauro de Bosis.

  She was sitting cross-legged on Abel’s bed with that plane on her lap when Nicholas, carrying the Gentleman Jack and the jelly glasses under his arms, walked in without knocking. He put the glasses and the bottle on the desk.

  “I think Abel named his first daughter, Laura, for Lauro.”

  “I used to call Abel Icarus.”

  “Neoconservatism gave him wings?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And the second President Bush was the sun he flew too close to?”

  “Or, his conscience came back.”

  Abel had named his first daughter, Laura, for Lauro de Bosis, a charming unfortunate who (on October 3, 1931, after flying above and papering with antifascist pamphlets the Spanish Steps and much of central Rome) had vanished: into midair, or into the sea, or crashed to earth and obliteration; or, mayhap, had glided to a quiet shore and simply chosen to abandon lover, mother, sibs, and friends.

  History records, if you exclude the reports in the fascist papers, that except for his poetry, Lauro was never heard from again.

  “He told me he was taking you to Rome to patch things up.”

  “We stayed at the wrong hotel.”

  Lauro’s act, the overly dramatic, silly gesture of an embarrassed son betrayed by an enchanting mother— she had written a groveling letter to Mussolini— had appealed to Abel mightily.

  The part Abel had seemed to like best was not the thing that had happened, but the thing that had unhappened: The significance of Lauro’s parents, Adolpho and Lillian, had been diminished. They had been rather famous and acknowledged to be glamorous, but over time they had come to be known, when they were remembered at all, as mere relations of the bold antifascist and ardent lover Lauro.

  By a failed feat of sufficient imagination and bravado, the father had been eclipsed, and the son was to be remembered.

  For Abel, who had shivered long in the chill shadow of paternal imminence, this flavor of gone-from-the-face-of-the-earth had been indescribably delicious. He had wanted to gorge on it. Or so it had seemed to Hope, when Abel had told her the story sitting in the café with a view of the Spanish Steps where he had attempted to woo her to remain in the life they had chosen, when they had returned to Rome one last time to talk about divorce or fall in love again.

  On that trip, out of the blue, Abel had quoted to Hope fragments of a poem by Jacopo Sannazzaro that was supposed to have something to do with Lauro, and with Abel and Hope:

  Happy the man who meets with such a fate

  And by his death obtains so great a prize!

  The days after death are filled with dreams. The night after Abel died, Hope dreamed that the pi lots Lauro had rented his wings from had lied when they’d stated to the police investigators that they hadn’t been informed of his intentions when he had rented the plane. She dreamed that the pi lots had known what Lauro had been planning to do and they had filled his tanks with extra fuel, and that Lauro had made it to North Africa.

  On the day after the presumed death of Lauro de Bosis, a copy of a letter Lauro had written, titled, then mailed before rushing skyward toward the center of Rome and oblivion appeared in a Rome paper. He had called it “The Story of My Death.” Lauro had effectively seized the last word.

  Abel had believed in the possibility that Lauro was alive. Hope hadn’t. According to Hope, if Lauro had been alive he would have returned to his woman, Ruth Draper. Ruth had died manless. To Hope, Abel’s arguing that Lauro was alive had just been a way of playing torture wife, not a true conviction. To her mind, Abel’s belief that Lauro could be alive but not return to Ruth Draper was vicious love-blindness.

  If Lauro were alive, Hope had thought and said, he would have returned to the woman he could suckle and fuck, to the second of his two caramadres, Ruth Draper. And Hope had feared anew Abel’s ignorance of heart-chivalry.

  Lauro had been not a little in love with his mother. In Ruth Draper, an actress seventeen years his senior, he had found an outlet for that ripe passion.

  And Ruth had wanted him—boy and man. His passion for her— she would describe him as the most ardent lover she had ever known— had split her life, as his hips had split her legs (she had been forty-one when they’d met), right down the middle. He had plunged firmly into her pierced but unbroken center. Then he had vanished.

  Icarus. Jesus. It was occurring to Hope to associate her first husband’s evolving infatuation with Christianity with his affinity for sons who abscond with their father’s power. God may have created the world, but Abel’s world was fixated on Jesus. His red words in the Bible. A funky bracelet on a child’s wrist: WWJD? What would Jesus do? Something radical. Something perhaps even God wouldn’t understand.

  Underlying the fervently Jesus-centered faith of the Promise Keepers was a fear of God the father.

  Promise Keepers resolved this fear, and perhaps a few oedipal anxieties, by asserting that the father’s time was plain over. Hope told Nicholas about men by the stadium-ful flocking to hear charismatic preachers deliver, under the rubric of “Biblical Manhood,” variations on the theme.

  Prompted to remember that Abel had been standing in the crowd when evangelical Christian men— five hundred thousand strong—had rallied round the Washington Monument by a photograph of the event sitting prominently on his desk, Hope and Nicholas shook their heads.

  “Their question isn’t ‘Is God dead?’ ” said Nicholas.

  “Their question is ‘Why won’t God die and give us a turn?’ ” said Hope.

  “I wish Abel had been kind enough to leave us a ‘Story of My Death,’ ” said Nicholas.

  “I wish he hadn’t tried to get Ajay to wear one of those WWJD bracelets,” said Hope.

  Eventually, Abel’s Christianity had been less about the triumph of sons over fathers and more about the movement to the authority of a society of men, the Apostles, above the rule of one man, Jesus, than it had been about forgiveness and tomorrow. It had been more about the abandoned baby in the manger with no human father at all than about the man hanging on the cross, certain he would soon be with his father. It had been about flying too close to the sun with wings that did not melt, and thereby gaining the sky.

  “Il mourut poursuivant une haute advanture.” Nicholas was reading out loud the words Hope had painted onto the wing of the plane she had whittled for Abel.

  Nicholas knew the poem the line on the wing came from: Icare, written by Philippe Desportes in the sixteenth century. He remembered the bit more of it Abel had long ago recited to him:

  Icare est cheut icy, le jeune audacieux,

  Qui pour voler au ciel eut assez de courage:

  Icy tomba son corps degarny de plumage,

  Laissant tous braves coeurs de sa cheute envieux.

  Bad as her French was, Hope understood enough to translate all of that to the question, How wide is Abel’s tomb?

  Even as death reframed all the events of Abel’s life, Hope had a growing sense that death did not completely contain him. Surprising ripples were felt. The peculiar wildness and originality of his death underlined her forgotten awareness of the peculiar wildness and originality of the man.

  “Why did you show me the pictures?”

  “I wanted to know if you recognized anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “I feared I recognized a signature.”

  “Feared.”

  “I didn’t want my darling to have done that.”

  “I don�
�t want Ajay’s daddy to have done that.”

  Nicholas took the plane from Hope’s hand. He sat in the old desk chair. He poured them both a drink.

  “Then you were a ‘dependent spouse.’ ”

  “A shocking title for me.”

  “Married to an intelligence officer.”

  “A fact I didn’t know at the time. Did he ever talk to you about when we lived in Old Town?”

  “He told me about Philoctete, and the day he told you about Manila, and about onion tarts.”

  “Lord, have mercy, today.”

  “But mainly he talked about your Christmas in Rome.”

  FOURTEEN

  ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1985, they were in the State Department’s A-100 class. Hope lasted three days tagging along as a dependent spouse before realizing that her presence was tolerated but not required. She stopped going to class, but she still drove in with Abel to the office so that she could have the car.

  By the end of the first week they had been chosen to housesit for an ambassador who lived in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia. She attempted to fill her days with her new and still novel domestic duties and with light-of-day Stoli martinis when she didn’t have too far to drive.

  It was a busy and expensive first fall. They had agreed to spend only one hundred dollars on birthday presents. They would splurge on a long weekend in Eu rope for Christmas but they would try to live much of their life on his salary. On Hope’s birthday Abel had given her a box full of hair ribbons. On his birthday, Hope gave Abel a National Geographic Atlas of the World. They savored their frugality.