Slipped inside the book was a photograph of Hope walking down Circuit Avenue, a photo of Hope that first summer on the Vineyard with her hair hacked off, wearing painter’s pants. One day Ajay would have a child. One day Hope would tell that child the history of Hope and Abel at the carousel.
Sixteen-year-old Clementine Hope Morgan, no longer answering to Clementine, walked down Circuit Avenue headed in the vague direction of the beach. When she saw the back side of a delicious-looking beige boy walking toward the Flying Horses, she changed direction.
Almost immediately she was waylaid by two St. Paul’s boys pedaling past on bikes who stopped to snatch quick hugs. When they continued on their way, she continued on her path to the amusement shed.
The boy-who-might-be-beautiful was walking away from her again but this time he was walking on a revolving platform as it began to turn, changing one horse for another, taunting and cuffing the younger boys, kissing and flattering the girls and the women before finally making a choice. The first time she saw his face he was laughing and golden surrounded by what appeared to be family.
Antoinette was there; Hope didn’t know her name then, or that for sure she was the mother, huge and beautiful, in size-twenty-two L.L. Bean clothes she had bought from a mail-order cata log. She was splayed across a thing that looked like a sleigh, dangling her feet in the air looking as if she could pluck a brass ring from the bar with her toes.
He was on a yellow horse frozen rearing up. Someone had told Hope on her first day on the island, on her first trip to the Flying Horses, trying to explain why this merry-go-round was so wonderful, that when the horses had been new the manes and the tails had been made of real horsehair. That day she hadn’t understood. But on this day the silly horses that didn’t go up and down, that just went round and round, were magical— because the pretty boy was astride the one with the green saddle blanket and the red saddle.
He noticed her watching him. He had noticed her earlier talking to the white boys on the Gitane Super Corsas. Abel had a Gitane Grand Sport— an excellent but slightly less excellent ride. He had noticed her because the two white boys that had been talking to her had been talking to a black girl just exactly the same way they would have talked to a white girl. And she was exactly like a white girl, almost plump and careless and fresh, soft, in a way he hadn’t known people like him and like her could be.
It made him sorry she was dressed strange. Who wore cream-colored paint er’s pants and espadrilles with a Lacoste shirt? She had her hair all cut off in a strange bush of tiny curls. She looked like a pretty boy with big breasts and a melon butt. He wanted to get inside of her.
This surprised him. He had as yet never been inside of a girl, and only one woman. Most girls looked polluted or boring, or worse, like something you fell into and got gobbled up by, vanishing. This girl was different.
He loved anticipating and talking with his gang of private-school boys about the promised joys of oral copulation. The other act, the alleged main event, the one he had, in fact, experienced, seemed too much the exact opposite of being born.
He had come out of a woman’s twat. He didn’t know why he would want to go back into one. In his head it was too much like dying.
He knew— hungering for the world, he read much— that the phrase for orgasm in French was la petite mort, the little death. And he knew orgasm, from alone with himself and from, once, an older girl at school. Alone with himself there was nothing to vanish into except the hand that was already his own. The almost-woman had been different. He had felt lost inside of her even as he had felt plea sure.
If he could possess this girl first, then plunge into her, maybe then after he vanished into her he would be vanishing into himself. He laughed aloud.
This girl in the strange clothes laughed along with him as if she heard the silent joke and wanted him to know she got it.
Or maybe just to get him to look at her more carefully. He complied. There was a line to ride the horses and she was in it. As she waited, she openly stared. Abel observed that waiting her turn was a novelty for this girl. The way she offered her stare as a gift made Abel jealous. She expected people to enjoy being caught in her gaze. He wanted that for himself.
He stared back at this girl who had no idea in the world what it was to cringe, flinch, or hang your head; who didn’t know there once had been a crime called reckless eyeballing, and his father had defended people prosecuted for it.
He wondered where she was from. Island gossip had it Washington, but he didn’t think that could be right. She didn’t seem like any bougie black D.C. girl he knew.
He would have wanted to slap the stare out of her eyes if she hadn’t been so obvious she envied him back.
She envied him. He saw that clearly. Usually this was not a surprise. He was a prince of the Negroes. With this peculiar girl staring at him, the words “prince” and “Negro” for the very first time didn’t rub each other wrong.
He was approaching the gold ring. It was within his reach. He left it for a younger rider. His mother smiled approvingly. He was beyond toys. They had given him education and social status; it only remained for him, according to them, to make a fortune. A million dollars, a single million, was the gold ring his family hoped he would reach out and grab. His own ambitions were different.
He didn’t care if he was rich. He only wanted two things: to see the world and to love whoever he wanted to love, not to choose from those assigned to him. He was only seventeen years old but he knew this much about himself.
And he also knew, staring at the insolent girl, who had no clue she was insolent and didn’t know that her short hair and her painter’s pants made her look like a boy, that she just might be somebody he wanted to do those things with.
Other girls joined her. Girls he knew. Appropriately skinny black girls with biggish butts wearing Lilly. These louder, less confident girls with diamond tennis bracelets had fathers who were doctors and lawyers. They were PLUs who knew their place in the world and on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
He didn’t know what this girl’s daddy did but he was willing to guess he wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer. He had heard someone say they thought her father was a gangster, that she went to some boarding school, and not one of the black ones, like Palmer or Piney Woods, and not one of the regular white ones black people had been going to since the fifties, like Northfield Mount Hermon and that Quaker school, Oakwood Friends.
When an older woman, someone who looked like somebody his mother might hire to cook, or clean, or keep the kids, called out, “Hope, Hope,” the girl scooted out of the line and out of the shed. “Hope.” He smiled. Her name was more perfect than the rest of her. And she had a nanny.
The platform was still turning, the horses were still flying. He couldn’t get to her but he knew her name. He laughed at another instance of his own bad luck. Hope snatched the older and darker woman’s hand and continued her ramble to the beach.
She got out her heavy black skillet and prepared to start frying chicken. Ajay and Waycross would for sure know they were home when they saw the bright orange chicken breasts on the pristine squares of white bread. She would make it so hot it would “get their heads straight right off.” Hot chicken stones you, and the high is always a first-time high.
According to local urban legend, people had been known to detox from crack on hot chicken and prayer. Hope mixed up her own special paste of cayenne and fine-chopped habaneros. She would get all their heads straight.
That day as she chopped the peppers her hands were stinging and her eyes were tearing and her mind was thinking about Washington and the Lord, about elephants and Jesus and Washington.
Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank,
Not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity,
But in simple obedience to duty, as they understood it,
These men suffered all sacrificed all dared all . . . and died.
Those were the words inscribed on the Confederate
Memorial. Pregnant words, particularly interesting to Hope as she pondered the fact that the plaque on the monument had been placed there by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, magnolia-white southern women, who themselves had faced the privations of war with an obedience that could never rightly be called simple.
Betrayed and betraying, cosseted and corseted, plagued and ignored, these women were peculiarly bound. They had served on an invisible front, gaining intimate knowledge of duty and the double-edged sword of freedom that attends it: the freedom to transcend or transgress, balancing the freedom to commit and serve.
There was a story about Elvis and his manager, Col o nel Tom Parker, that Abel and Hope had liked together. The Col o nel had started business life as the owner of a circus. He knew elephant handlers. Eventually he learned the big secret of the elephant tent. You get a little bitty baby elephant and a great big rope. You tie the rope around the elephant’s neck with a slipknot. You poke the elephant with a sharp stick. The elephant tries to break free of the rope and the rope tightens around his neck and holds. You poke him again and again until he learns not to try to break free, till the elephant knows the rope is stronger than he is.
You can tie that elephant down with that rope for the rest of his life—no matter how big he gets—as long as you never poke him with a sharper stick. As long as you don’t give him cause to discover his abilities have increased, as long as you keep him hobbled by memory, tethered by, and to, past realities.
Simple obedience requires complex illusions. “Duty as they understood it.” The words were a fitting epitaph for Abel, a man who was ever balancing freedom against duty and duty against freedom and fear against them both.
When the chicken was fried, each breast sitting on its square of Wonder bread with a near-fluorescent disk of green pickle, lightly flecked with cayenne, speared to its top like a medal, Hope walked into the library, found her DVD of Munich, the movie about the men who were secretly sent to avenge the Israeli athletes who had been massacred at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and pushed play.
Watching Munich it seemed like Abel had always been a spy. Not a lawyer at the Pentagon and an ex– Foreign Service officer and eventually a spy, but a spy always. That was the part of Nicholas’s story that conclusively persuaded.
She couldn’t trust all of Nicholas’s stories, for many reasons; the greatest of these was that Nicholas had a taste for mirrors. He would want to see Abel a spy. Want to see Abel gay. Want to see Abel returned to the Philippines.
Hope loved Abel differently. Negroes who survive to thrive exhibit highly original adaptations to life. As Prince sang, “Animals strike curious poses.” Hope wanted to invite the ghost of Abel to touch her stomach and feel how it trembled inside. She wanted Ajay to know her as a satisfied woman. Satisfied by Abel and satisfied by Waycross. That was a part of her duty: to teach her son that women could be satisfied. She would take Ajay someplace Antoinette had not taken Abel.
Finally, her white meal, or at least the moonshine in a Mason jar. The turkey on white bread with mashed potato sandwich looked too sad to eat when she pulled it from the freezer. She watched Munich, drank moonshine and Soir de France tea, missed Waycross, worried about Ajay, and just a little bit hated on Ari and Sammie. The movie was over when Ajay and Way-cross walked through the door.
They ate their dinner talking about Idlewild instead of Abel. Hope, this once, sat at the head of the table so she could reach out a hand to both of the living men she had been missing without having to stretch too far. Waycross said Idlewild had become a sad place. It had been empty and run-down for a long time, but now it was newly populated with the returning and disappointed.
“Old folks looking for something that’s not there anymore,” said Ajay.
“Like me?” asked Waycross.
“Yeah,” said Ajay.
“You going to school tomorrow?” asked Hope.
“Yeah.”
“Sure you shouldn’t wait?” asked Hope.
“I’m sure,” said Ajay.
“OK,” said Hope.
“I love Daddy, but I’m not sure I liked him,” said Ajay.
“I’m sure he loved him some you,” said Hope.
The son with dark and silver dreads rose from the table, kissed his mother on the top of her black and silver head, then walked out of the room. Waycross dropped his voice down low.
“Did I just hear you lie?” asked Waycross.
“I don’t think so,” said Hope.
In the same moment Hope and Waycross each leaned in toward the other. Their foreheads touched. Almost to his room, Ajay remembered he had left his phone on the table. Halfway back down the stairs he saw heads touching above the table and toes touching below. Hope and Waycross looked like exhausted boxers hanging on to each other to keep standing. Ajay turned and continued his upward march without disturbing his family.
Later that night Hope went upstairs into her son’s room just before he fell asleep. She sat in the chair nearest his bed.
“You didn’t know what Daddy did, did you?”
“No.”
“Did you know?”
“When I was really little, he used to tell me that he was double oh seven.”
The ability to see beauty beyond torture and desecration is the ability to love in ways that cannot be brought to disorder.
Later that night, or some night soon, in her red silk bra and pan ties Hope would slide beneath the sheets and onto Waycross’s side of the bed.
Ajay returned to school. Hope got back to her studio and her little bit of green day-trading. Holiday mode, and survival mode, were over. It was past time for Hope, daughter of a coal man, wife of a do-good doctor, mother of an expensive son, to get back to profitably investing in companies that invested in wind and solar energy— and her sculpting.
Eventually Hope went to talk to her shrink about Philoctete— the mythological creature, not the dog—about his wound, and his stench, and how she dreamed his sore had healed. With Nicholas gone she needed her shrink again.
She wanted to tell him about Bohol. How the Agency had approached her and she had agreed to help them in Bohol. How she had stepped off the ledge just about the time Abel had stepped out onto it. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had stepped out onto it one time in Bohol. Maybe there had been an arms dealer staying at their very hotel. Maybe there had been a diving accident. What was for sure: having her baby had been her way to make sure she never was lured into service again. The baby that had tied her to domesticity had tied Abel to paranoia. She kept her silences. Instead she told her shrink that her friend Moses Henry had turned out to be some sort of spy and Abel had too and so had Nicholas. Her shrink said she was a “spy magnet.” They laughed hard. It was the first time she had truly laughed since Thanksgiving.
Just before the end of the hour she told the shrink about a question Abel had asked her just after Ajay was born. It might have been in the middle of the night of his christening when they were in New York at the United Nations. Abel had woken up and asked her, “If God told you to choose between Ajay dying and all of England what would you say?”
“Poor En gland,” Hope had replied. Her shrink said a second thing. “Poor you. Poor Abel. Lucky Ajay.”
***
Christmas was coming. She would get her red gown, her mother’s gown, out of the cleaners. And she would take out Aunt Hot’s old jet-beaded pocketbook. She would take care of her family.
“What’s a zombie?” asked Hope.
“A dead person walking the earth,” said Sweet.
“And they ain’t all folks that died neither,” added Hot.
“No sir, most of ’em never lived,” said Sweet.
“Born right out of their mother’s asses dead,” said Hot.
“They be born out of their mama’s pocketbooks like everybody else on this earth, but you know what Hot means,” said Sweet.
And Hope did know. “Pocketbook” was the aunts’ euphemism for vagina. The girls of Milleville w
ould eat that up. Only she wouldn’t be telling them. She would be keeping community secrets. If the aunts told her there were zombies walking the earth, she would believe there were zombies. She knew exactly what to say. She had good home training.
“I think my papa was a zombie,” said Hope.
“We been wonderin’ ’bout that,” said Sweet.
She put out the crèche. She planned and cooked the meals. They moved to and through the longest night and shortest day of the year, to and through Ajay’s first Christmas without Abel. New Year’s they ate black-eyed peas and greens and began again.
THIRTY-ONE
TWELFTH NIGHT. EPIPHANY. Little Christmas. January 6, 2006. Whatever you call it, the day chosen to celebrate the arrival of the Wise Men at the manger was the day Mo chose to check on Hope. He invited her to lunch. First they caught up on the gossip.
“I hear you made a trip to Italy.”
“To Rome.”
“Sammie took her kids to Alaska for Christmas.”
“That’s wild.”
“The boys went hunting from helicopters.”
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