The genius of the American hotel room is that it does not ask me to adjust to its personality or history because it has neither. It is a psychically neutral space into which you can bring whomever you are and know it will be received. (That’s more than a lot of us can say about home.)
Across the street, West End Avenue, is Centennial Park. At the far end of the park is a full-scale replica of the Parthenon. I lived here for almost seven years and never got used to driving by and seeing one of the most famous pagan structures in the Western world.
I’ve never been in the park. Blacks were not allowed thirty years ago. My credibility and trustworthiness depended on not taking advantage of my whiteness and eschewing the social privileges white skin gave me. Oh, there were times I wanted to sneak off for a steak at an exclusive restaurant or check into a hotel and spend the weekend having room service and taking bubble baths. But I didn’t. And I never went walking through Centennial Park or sat on the steps of the Parthenon. I won’t even now. Those of us who remember “then” have an obligation to it. It isn’t right that white people in the South walk around as if segregation never happened. How dare they act as if they don’t need to remember what southern blacks cannot forget. That is the sin — to live as if you have no responsibility for the pain of others.
Bobby and I were talking the other night about how angry we are. Bobby is Robert Card. He was a freshman when I was at Fisk and had a crush on me, he maintains. I didn’t know. He dropped out of Fisk to work for Cal in Mississippi. I never knew what happened, but Cal sent him to New York to fund-raise, which he did well for a while. He told me what the years have been like for him, years of drinking, of fights, of months in hospitals, sometimes in strait jackets, always on tranquilizers of some kind.
He has been OK now for almost for fifteen years, though he still takes medications and goes to AA meetings every day. Sometimes, a lot of times, he can’t sleep until he gets up, dresses and lays across the bed atop the covers. That’s how he slept when he was organizing in Mississippi. He says he knows no one is going to drive by and shoot in his house or throw dynamite on the porch, and he shrugs with an embarrassed helplessness and bewilderment.
I understand the power of memory to seize the soul and hold it close, stopping time. When time stops, life stops. Oh, gray comes into the hair, and the hips widen and the breasts sag, but this deterioration of the flesh is programmed like baby teeth.
I understand because I look back and see nothing I can call a life. Bobby has a child, at least. Adisa. She is 22 and lives here. Last week he invited me to dinner at his house — me, Adisa and her mother, Kathy. I think he wanted me to be a witness that he had accomplished something in his life.
His daughter is in law school at Vanderbilt. When she told me I started to say that Vanderbilt didn’t admit colored but that was thirty-two years ago in a Nashville, Tennessee, that exists only for the emotionally disabled like me and Bobby. I do not know the Nashville, Tennessee, in which Adisa grew up, a Nashville where black and white went to movie theaters together, sat at lunch counters, ate rare steaks in the same restaurants, those who could afford steaks. I cannot imagine a Nashville, Tennessee, in which one does not need to be afraid.
I did not remember Kathy though I pretended I did. She is small, with dark skin, and a graying Afro shaping her tiny face. She works for a social service agency of some kind. She and Bobby never married and do not live together now. She still loves him. I could tell by the avidity of her gaze as he set food on the table.
Bobby does not see her love. He cannot receive what he does not know exists. She knows and it hurts. He is still in love with Amy, a white girl he lived with in New York back in the seventies, but he doesn’t know if she is dead or alive or even where she is.
The three of us sat at the dinner table attentive to her or his private sorrow and Adisa sat among us, oblivious to how much pain a person can have and still live. She will learn because the extent of one’s maturity depends on how you live with your pain.
I admire Bobby because after all these years, he is still trying to get it right. He is still trying to figure out what you have to do in this life to be able to lie down at night with a measure of peace.
I certainly don’t know.
“I was always curious how you got to be Cal’s girl Friday,” Kathy asked pointedly but without hostility when we were having dessert.
I shrugged. “Whenever he needed something mundane done, I would do it. And nobody else wanted to do things like make plane reservations, keep his appointment calendar, remind him when he had to do this or that, not to mention be on call twenty-four hours a day and be prepared to go anywhere at anytime.”
Kathy smiled finally. “It’s good to see you, Lisa. And it’s good to see you haven’t changed.”
“What do you mean?”
“We, meaning the black women, always respected you. You didn’t play power games; you didn’t try to lord it over us because you were the only one who had instant access to Cal. At the same time, if we needed to ask him a question or get a message to him, you wouldn’t act as intermediary but make it possible for us to see Cal ourselves. At the same time, you acted as Cal’s eyes and ears and if we wanted Cal to know something, we only had to mention it casually to you. You kept your counsel. And, from the way you just answered me, you’re still doing the same.”
I looked at her and could not tell if the last comment was honed. She was smiling, but I had always marveled at how black women could smile an anger. I could feel a tight stillness at the table and I desperately wished I could think of something witty to say that would enable us all to breathe again. But I’m not even one of those who thinks hours later of what I should’ve said.
“Perhaps that is why Cal trusted you so much,” she said suddenly. ‘’Perhaps that is why we did, too.”
“Thank you,” I managed to respond.
We all breathed again, but I still did not know whether to believe her. And, I found that I did not care. I have little patience with the resentment of black women toward white women, with their accusations against white women for taking “their men.” Black women have written about how disgraceful and embarrassing it was that John Calvin Marshall died in the arms of a white woman, and what was he doing coming out of a motel with a white woman anyway?
It appears that many blacks (and forget whites) cannot grasp the simple fact that love is private and no one has the right to judge anyone for whom he or she loves or how.
When I left I wondered if Kathy loves Bobby or does she merely want him to stop loving Amy?
Friday, 1 A.M.
I have been away ten days and I see on the Weather Channel that it has snowed twice since I left. How dare nature produce snow without me there to appreciate it? Here, it is already spring. I had forgotten how early and quickly it comes in the South. In Vermont the light is still thin and will remain so for another two months. Here the light is robust, a bright shining portending the heat of summer.
Nashville has changed but only superficially. It has expressways now, which any municipality must have if it is going to puff out its civic pride and call itself a city. The expressways have huge signs hanging over them directing you to Knoxville and Memphis and Louisville, as if there is no reason to exit in Nashville. The local exit signs are few and aren’t very helpful if you don’t already know how to get where you want to go, and if you already know, you don’t need them.
Nashville is a small town pretending to be a city. It has a couple of tall buildings, the state capitol, the Country Music Hall of Fame, Grand Old Opry and a number of colleges and universities — Vanderbilt and Fisk being the most well known. But everyone drives slowly, except on Friday and Saturday nights, and people speak to you in stores and on the street as if you’d been at their house yesterday for coffee, and you regret that you hadn’t.
When I drove in from the airport I was lost until I saw an exit sign for Jefferson Avenue. Jefferson goes by Fisk. Fisk is in the opposite part of to
wn from the Holiday Inn but I knew the preexpressway route to it from there.
I stopped by the school before going to the motel. As I went onto the campus, emotions came with the rush of bats from a cave at dusk. I had no idea why or from whence came this pain and the sob I refused to release. There were emotions in my heart and images in my mind, but the emotions were not evoked by the images. I felt like a Picasso with an eye in my skull and a tear at my navel.
The images in my mind were like the ones we see of our parents when they were young, photographs taken before we were born or even thought of (and don’t you resent that your parents had lives and were even happy before you came into existence?). Although there is a resemblance between the people in the photos and our flesh-and-blood parents, we don’t know the people in the photographs. We do not want to share in those smiles that were smiled before we were born. Those people have no presence in our souls, and neither do our parents as long as the two in those old photographs remain images. We want to confine the lives of our parents to the parameters of our relationship to them, which means we have no interest in them as they are. But if we are somewhat awake in our lives, we will recognize that such an attitude brings us mouth-to-mouth with our own self-centeredness. If we can withstand the self-disgust, we have stumbled onto the narrow trail to wisdom.
These images were of me, however. I went into the chapel, a round building except at the far end where the choir loft and pulpit are, went up to the balcony and sat where I had the day I first saw John Calvin Marshall. No emotion. I came down and stood in the foyer where we met and recalled him addressing me as Elizabeth, a name no one before or since has called me by. No emotion.
However, as I came out of the chapel I happened to look west across the campus and saw a tiny red-brick building. Feeling and memory joined.
When the photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz died, his widow, the painter Georgia O’Keefe, wanted to give his art collection to those who did not have ready access to art. So, she divided his collection into three parts and gave one-third to a small black school in Nashville, Tennessee, Fisk University. Though O’Keefe did not have someone like me in mind as being among the art-denied, I loved that gallery and that collection.
It was there I learned about early twentieth-century contemporary American art — Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, O’Keefe, of course, John Marin — how I loved his water-colors and the way he broke light into splinters to achieve luminosity. I also saw the work of black artists for the first time and remember in particular a Romare Bearden rendering of the crucifixion.
I went by the gallery but it was closed. So I sat on the steps and, suddenly, all the joy and lightness and wonder that is yours simply because you’re 19 and have no doubt that you are immortal returned and I was again that girl who had sat on the benches of the gallery staring at the captured images of color and line, not knowing what I was seeing as much as I was enthralled and exhilarated that I could see. I suppose that is the function of visual art — to make you glad that you can see. And I remembered the woman of the later years who came home to Nashville tired after a week, a month, three months on the road with Cal, and often I would find an afternoon to go to the gallery. Those paintings became a still point that held me fast in time and space, and I could remember there was a realm where race did not matter, where people did not express how much they despised themselves for being white by proclaiming their whiteness superior. As I sat on the step in the surprise of gladness at whom I had been, I was happy that Georgia O’Keefe had given the paintings to Fisk and the sob broke open and I cried because I had never written to tell her what a difference her gift had made in my life, how it had sustained me and now she was dead and I had not said thank you.
When the tears stopped and I was walking back to my rent-a-car, a Blazer, of course, I realized that during those moments on the steps, memory and emotion had been one and I had dwelled in my life with all the ease of a tent dweller in the desert.
That’s how it is when I ski or hike or even now, sitting here before the computer. I love the computer, Gregory. I even love DOS! Skiing and hiking and computers. What’s the common denominator? All three bring me into magic, into a realm of enchantment. Anything that places us in the presence of or gives us access to the power of dismay enables us to be in a relationship with magic.
I don’t know what that means, Gregory. But I don’t have to understand something to know it’s true.
The older I get the less I understand about who anybody is and why we do what we do. Why are you a dentist? Do you like teeth? But how can anyone like teeth? How does one choose to spend his life sticking his fingers inside people’s mouths? We’ve been married twenty years and I haven’t figured it out, Gregory. Did you just wake up one morning and say, ‘Damn! What a way to spend a life!’ I thought I would, in time, get used to being touched by hands that groped in people’s mouths, hands bathed in the spit of a humanity that can’t find a cure for halitosis. I never have. The thought of your spit-covered hands touching me has made me nauseous for twenty years and I’m sickened I feel like that.
I got into a conversation once with a gynecologist’s wife. I think it was at some dental convention back when I was still trying to figure out what a wife was and what the hell she did. (Gave up on that pretty quickly, didn’t I?) There was also a convention of gynecologists going on at the hotel and we happened to meet in the hotel bar. I asked her if she responded sexually when her husband stuck a finger in her vagina or anus while they were making love, or did she wonder if he was giving her an exam, or did she ever wonder if he could tell if she were having an affair by feeling inside her vagina? Did she ever wonder why a man would want to spend his life sticking his finger in vaginas and was he getting a secret sexual thrill from doing so? And did thinking about all these things, if she did, make her frigid? She slapped my face, or would have if my athlete’s reflexes hadn’t made me grab her wrist. I’m not sure we are supposed to understand our lives, Gregory. Isn’t it enough to live them with whatever spirit we can muster?
You know by now that Andrea Williams Marshall died today. I watched the reports on TV tonight. She was an impressive figure when the cameras were rolling. At a time when so much of public discourse consists of the projection of an image that will evoke warm feelings rather than thought, Andrea Marshall had her place. By her adopting the role of the widow, the nation was forced to remember John Calvin Marshall, and remembering him, it could not totally lose touch with some vague notion of racial equality and justice.
I came here to be with her. When I left ten days ago, all I knew was that I had to come. Once here and once it became clear that she was not going to recover, I knew I had come to hold her as she died, to hold her as I had held Cal, and I was with her when she died.
Daddy had a heart attack and was dead within hours. He never regained consciousness and if he had, I could never have gotten there in time. Jessica developed Alzheimer’s. God, I hated her for doing that. I know that sounds stupid, but you didn’t know her. I have no doubt she developed Alzheimer’s so she wouldn’t have to try and communicate with me, so she wouldn’t have to take responsibility for what and who she had been. She always thought I wanted her to apologize for the love she failed to give me. I wanted far more than an “I’m sorry.” I wanted her to take responsibility for failing me. She made sure she wouldn’t be able to do that. Sixty years old and she didn’t know who I was, who she was or where she was. I would sit by her bed in the nursing home wishing I could understand why she had been in the world. What difference had it made that she had lived? No one had loved her. Not daddy, not me. She died suddenly in the middle of the night, as you probably remember. When they called and told me, I wanted to tell them to put her body in a Glad trash bag and put it out on the curb.
Once you reach a certain age, each death demands a reliving of the previous deaths in your life. I pity you that your parents are still living. No wonder you can’t grow up. As long as you are a son or
daughter, you cannot occupy your own place in the world. The deaths of our parents is the fortuitous loss that forces us to fill this raw and new emptiness with ourselves — whoever that is.
I know one of the reasons you wanted to marry me was because I had been a part of history. You were proud to have as your wife the woman who had been John Calvin Marshall’s personal secretary. I was amused and I shouldn’t have been. If I had known better, I would have been outraged that you dared put your fantasies on my life. But I was amused. Maybe I was even flattered. I was important in your eyes. I had been an intimate part of the life of one of the great men of the twentieth century. I’m not sure anymore how true that is. I’m not sure if it was ever true. I wonder if I have not been a fantasy in my own life.
You probably think Andrea and I were close because I came to be with her as she lay dying. We were not. During the years I worked for Cal, I don’t know that all the sentences Andrea and I exchanged would make a page of double-spaced text. There were weeks when I was in and out of her house daily. Cal’s office was in the basement but it was like a separate apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen. I could hear Andrea moving around upstairs. She could hear me on the typewriter in the basement or see my truck in the driveway.
Yet, Andrea and I had something in common no one else had — Cal. That was never acknowledged openly between us. I did not want her to die without our meeting and talking.
I think I was wrong.
Forgive me but it is 2:30. I am going to bed.
Being open and honest with one’s spouse is exhausting.
Friday, 9 A.M.
Bobby called at seven this morning, crying, pleading with me to help him with the arrangements for Andrea’s funeral. I almost said yes. How do you refuse someone who needs you? And that’s the lure that gets you into the trap.
I felt guilty for saying no to him. I feared saying yes, however, feared it would only be the first of many assents as Bobby desperately sought a replacement for Andrea and I am the only candidate because he and I shared the same beginning.
And All Our Wounds Forgiven Page 15
