I said that was not going to happen.
“Yes, it will, Pearlie. You know you can’t keep living this way.”
“Let us be,” I said. “Why did you come here?”
“To talk to you. To set you free.”
“Damn you. Don’t pretend you’re helping me—”
“We have to help each other.”
“What does Holland say?”
Buzz didn’t move. Headlights of a car going by lit up his hair, shining like a cap of silver cloth; he was handsome again in that light, terribly in love, heartbroken, a jilted lover trying to hold back any sign of it from me.
“I see,” I said.
“Yes. It’s complicated.”
“Holland doesn’t want to leave us, does he?”
“There is something holding him back—” he began.
I shook my head to keep from hearing him. Holland and I had talked about our friends and our childhoods and movies and books and politics—we had agreed and disagreed and had our fights and merry moments over a beer—but I think it’s fair to say we had never spoken honestly in all our lives. And, in my peculiar way, I had thought that I was happy. At the time, my sense was that marriage was like a hotel shower: you get the temperature right and someone just beyond the wall turns on his shower and you are stung with ice water, you adjust the heat only to hear him yelp from pain, he adjusts his, and so on until you reach a tepid compromise that both of you can endure.
“Let us be. I can’t help you.”
“I know you will. You must.”
“But he’s my husband, I love him.”
“Now you know you’re not the only one,” he said. It was a different voice, not the one he’d practiced over the years. The fractured voice of a man who traveled the world to escape a broken heart, who returned to an empty apartment, with all the old photos, nothing changed. Who lay awake wondering how he lost all he ever cherished.
Not the only one. As if all claims were equal claims, and marriage and children and years of life meant nothing; as if his love were as dense and bright as a star, outweighing any others. Mine, my son’s. The world went not to the meek but to the heart-wrung, the starving, the passionate. The rest barely counted as living. The world went to men like Buzz.
It had been a long time since I’d seen straight through a man. I had spent my days caring for my little boy, and for my husband, and for my house; it was simpler not to notice other people. Other people hide themselves, after all; they work so hard to do it. But a writer once said that pain reveals things. I think that was true of Buzz, when the light came in and I glimpsed the suffering that had brought him to this.
I watched a car’s headlights reach through the window and draw a line across the poor man’s broken nose. It stilled me, and for a moment I believed him. There was the proof of the suffering he was willing to endure. There it was, smashed into his face so he could never for an instant forget it.
“You won’t be abandoned, I promise you that. I’ve thought it all over.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“I can take care of you, Pearlie,” he told me.
I threw Lyle more ice and he caught it, taking it out into the hall where he could fracture it in privacy. “I can’t listen to this.”
“I can help you if you help me.”
He said it very plainly then. For a long time, in that living room, he explained what he had in mind, and I said nothing at all as he described how he would give me his fortune if I would help him. You could say he was bargaining for my husband. “I can take care of you. Think of Sonny, and sending him to college. Life isn’t set, life isn’t done. Think of what you want.”
I said he couldn’t be serious, and he said nothing.
“Help you how?” I took him by the arm but couldn’t look at his face. Instead my eyes searched the room, that old living room of mine, that old witness to the events of my life. The wind blew around the house, and there, through the bottom of the door, a little sand began to make its way in. Off somewhere, a car radio started playing “Kiss of Fire.”
“There is someone in the way,” he said, smiling a little.
I would have lived in the Outside Lands forever, clipping my newspaper by the ocean, vines creeping over the house as in a fairy tale—Sleeping Duty—aunts numbing me from time to time with gifts and stories, kissing my husband every night before I went to bed; I would have borne it. But he came to my house, like a wave at high tide, and ruined the little castle I had built. I could not believe what I was hearing; I knew it was bad for all of us, and what he told me felt like an unearned punishment. Like an electrocution.
“Don’t ever come back here,” I said.
After he left, I closed and locked the door, then every window in the house, as if somehow he’d break in during the night and I’d awaken and find him standing in my living room. “Think about it, please call me,” he said at the door before I closed it on him, “EXbrook 2-8600.” I can still remember the exchange. I sat on the couch with Lyle beside me. Together, we watched the bars of light that moved along the floor as one car after another made its way down our quiet street. We listened to the neighbors calling to one another from house to house, talking about the Rosenberg or the Sheng cases, the conversation drifting until they said good night. After long periods of silence, we could hear the growl of the Pacific. Lyle did not move from my side. My husband did not call. And Buzz did not return.
I drank the rest of the whiskey—half a bottle at least—and then, after the streets were cleared and the cool of the ocean took over the night again, after I went to look at Sonny sleeping with one leg thrown out over the covers, eyelashes matted from a passing nightmare, mouth slightly open like a girl waiting for a kiss, I drunkenly stumbled into my bedroom, weeping, and caught sight of the wastepaper basket.
There, in a mound, lay the clippings: the news I had censored for the sake of Holland’s transposed heart. A heart, it turned out, that beat as regularly as my own. A catalog of American daily life that the rest of us had lived through and my husband had not. I turned the basket over on the bed and made a leaf pile of paper. One by one, I read them and thought of the countless other stories I had clipped throughout our marriage. I was drunk and stunned and wild with revelations, my heart muscling its way through my chest like a panicked man in a crowded room.
1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you’ve chopped one off, another war had begun. With a draft and an enemy just like the one before, only this time there were nuclear weapons; there were veterans’ cemeteries that refused to bury Negro soldiers; there was a government telling you what to look for in a nuclear flash, what kind of structure to hide under should the sirens start wailing—though they must have known that it would have been madness to look or hide or consider anything except lying down and taking your death in with one full breath. There were the subcommittee hearings with Sheedy asking McLain on TV, “Are you a red?” whereupon McLain threw water into his face, and Sheedy threw water back and knocked off his glasses. A world in which TV stations were asked to segregate characters on their shows for Southern viewers, in which all nudes were withdrawn from a San Francisco art show because “local mother Mrs. Hutchins’s sensibilities are shaken to the core”; and beautiful Angel Island became a guided missile station, and a white college student was expelled for proposing to a Negro, and they were rioting against us in Trieste; the Allies freed Trieste not many years ago, and suddenly they hated us … and hovering above all this, every day in the paper, that newsprint visage like the snapshot of a bland Prometheus: Ethel Rosenberg’s face.
When would the all clear come? Didn’t somebody promise us an all clear if we were good, and clean, and nice, and were willing to die for things, and believe in things, and agreed to do everything right? Where was our all clear?
But there was more. An invisible world, now made obvious, like those codes that can only be read with special glasses; it had bee
n there all along: a list of men arrested for sex crimes, a quarter of them for congress with other men, their names right there in the paper; following a directive to “break the back” of an imagined security issue—barely reported, certainly uncriticized—the hundreds of State Department firings for rumors of deviant desire. The white navy doctor set free from his trial for gouging out the eyes of a Negro man who suggested “a vile perverted act.” And young Norman Wong smiling in a neat black suit, saddled with a $14,000 mortgage on his fruit ranch, who coaxed a white air force captain—his lover—to murder his wife for the insurance money, saying, “I loved her too much to shoot her myself.” That photo of plain Silvia Wong—the unkillable wife—in a blouse buttoned to the top to hide the wounds, weeping at the courthouse because she still loved Norman and if he went to jail she would have to wait two years to bear his children.
Later I would face my worst fears in the library, forcing myself to read about acts even the court stenographer found too “repulsive” to be included. Police peering through windows and keyholes, drilling holes in walls, building a false ceiling so they could lie in the rafters and spy on poor unsuspecting men. The maximum sentence for those crimes, I would discover, had just been raised to life in prison. If not prison, then registration as a sex offender; my son’s home would always be recorded in red ink. And I would come across a more chilling alternative: sterilization. Unable to discover whether “perverts” had been exempted by 1953, I would find an astounding figure: the number of California men degraded in this way. Twenty thousand. I would leave those books as I found them: dog-eared, smudging, foxed and torn, worn away by desperate readers who had come before me.
That night, in my deranged state, those newspaper clippings stood before me like criminals in a lineup, staring out with bleary eyes, each one an aspect of the world that Buzz revealed to me. All the silence and lies of a nation. Holland’s heart would have to bear it now. Like a king’s taster who has eaten his limit of poison, I could not take it anymore—all I’d tried to hide from him—I could not swallow any more of the world.
I pulled out the gloves Buzz had given me; I put them on. The red bird fluttered in my palm. I clenched it tight inside my fist; I felt its awful twitching struggle.
The telephone operator greeted me kindly and I told her to dial EXbrook 2-8600. A crickety voice answered. I asked to be put through to Mr. Drumer, please, and she said, Gal you can’t be calling this early. I said someone’s life was at stake, and that seemed to get her. A pop of sound and a man was on the line, sleeptalking, saying Pearlie? Pearlie?
“I have to protect my son,” I said.
He wanted to know if I would help him. “That’s what I’m telling you.” I sat there staring at the dawn as he said what he wanted me to do. From the front door came the shivering sound of bottles on the step. A truck started up and rolled away. All I could do was sit there on the phone bench and listen, shaking a little, thinking everyone must be an optical illusion, even the one we love. We think we know them, flat and simple—not at all. They are faceted in ingenious ways, with hundreds of hidden sides, impossible to discover even in a lifetime. Razor-sharp, frightening sides. I heard the man talking softly in my ear. I could save my son, if not my marriage. Life could be exchanged; could be better, what you’d dreamed of; could be built on a cliff above the roaring world. A choice: take this, or nothing. There was no other option, in those days long ago, in my outpost by the sea. Not for colored girls like me.
II
I will never forget Eslanda Goode Robeson, wife of the singer Paul Robeson, called before the committee that year. Cohn and McCarthy questioned her about being a Communist, and that proud colored woman sat in her flowered dress and hat and declined to answer, under protection of the Fifth and Fifteenth amendments. The Fifteenth? asked a flustered Roy Cohn. “Yes, the Fifteenth,” Mrs. Robeson told him regally. “I am Negro, you know. I have been brought up to seek protection under the Fifteenth Amendment as a Negro.” Cohn told her it was nonsense; the Fifteenth was about the right to vote. But she shook her head: “I have always sought protection under it… you see, I am a second-class citizen in this country and, therefore, feel the need of the Fifteenth. That is the reason I use it. I am not quite equal to the rest of the white people.” Cohn could get nowhere else with her; it was beyond translation, her version of life in our country.
They don’t teach Eslanda Goode Robeson in schools. There is no room in textbooks, among all the myriad battles and treaties, for history’s wives. But what she said about needing extra armor to protect herself, I never forgot it. It glowed in my mind. It guided my life like a sextant.
We were the only Negro family in the Sunset. It would have made a difference if I’d had a friend to trust, some colored woman who could hide me and Sonny in her sewing room the way she might hide a beaten wife; I might have fled into her arms. But I was not beaten; I was, in my way, beloved. And I had no friend like that. Even Edith, the only Jew in our neighborhood, mirroring my solitude across the street, was not someone I could turn to. There was no question of fleeing that night with Sonny; imagine a colored woman walking down the highway with her crippled boy, seeking aid from other migrants. That was no way to save him. The logical place to turn would have been the Negro community on Fillmore, but we had cut ourselves off from that world as well.
At the time, I blamed his aunts. They claimed to have come from Hawaii, descended on their father’s side from a West Indian sea captain’s daughter and a grandson of Captain Cook, and that lovely but improbable legend allowed them to feel distinct. They were typical of the old Negro society in San Francisco: cultured, intellectual, eager to set up the right kind of marriage, the men going around with walking sticks and the women with cameo brooches of Caucasian faces. They considered themselves apart from the rest of their race, as did Holland. I remember one time, one of the first dinners I made for the aunts, when they told me: “We may have had an African ancestor four or five generations ago, but as you can see the European blood has diluted it.” I listened to that speech with wonder, almost admiration. What an attractive fantasy: to believe you could leave race problems behind.
Yet they clung to segregation. “We prefer it this way,” they told me and Holland. “Negroes should work, eat, and shop together.” They had wanted to sell off the “Sunset property” as they called it and have me and Holland move close to them on Fillmore, in the Negro district, where it was growing crowded with families who could find no other place that would rent to them, but I put my foot down. I wanted a different life, a better one, in my mind. And so we lived out by the ocean, far from our people. It might not have been the right thing to do, in the end; it could be I was trying to pass as much as the aunts, as much as Holland himself. But I remember Thurgood Marshall came to San Francisco that very spring of 1953, and the paper quoted him as saying that the reason some Negroes favored segregated armies was so they could be generals. Perhaps the aunts favored a segregated San Francisco so they could be mayors of that little world. They did not see what was happening, what was about to happen in our country. Poor old women; I think they were too terrified.
Of course, I was just as much to blame. I was as terrified as anyone, knowing the danger my husband was in. Had he not seen the recent photo from Compton, a day’s drive from us: a burning cross in the yard of a Negro running for Senate? Or had I clipped that from the paper, as well? What a tragic time to be a man like him.
I did not know how to fight a white man; I was born without that muscle. But I knew one thing: I knew silence, which like an exotic poison—odorless, tasteless—brings a subtle madness to the victim. I became half mad with fear and shame, now that my carefully constructed world had been tornado-torn from its foundations, the walls and windows hurled at me so that all I could do was crouch and wait for it to subside. My doubts, my questions; I stoppered them like moths in a killing jar. Some tinge of wifely duty still colored my actions, hoping to protect Holland and his past. Buzz had made everything
plain to me, but I still went about my day to the syncopated beating of a transposed heart, and my instincts were those of a nurse who discovers, late in her rounds, that her patients have fled in the night. Whose life shall she save now? Her own?
I found myself unable to sleep, remembering how chance had brought us together—twice—and considering, like a woman about to pawn an heirloom, exactly what it could get me, what it was worth, what I was preparing to forsake. Not just our marriage but what we had done to get there, that secret story. Our love story, you might say. It was a simple tale from the war, but it was not the version I ever told to strangers or friends. I kept it hidden. I thought we had left that behind us, beneath us, yet here it showed itself, nightly, surfacing like a body from the deep.
It was the summer of 1943; we were still in our teens. One afternoon, Holland’s mother delivered his draft card to him on the front porch where we sat listening to the radio. “Well look at that,” he said. He was a quiet boy; you could not make out what he thought of death. It could have been a stranger to him, or terrified him to the core, but his mother, a tough skinny widow, was well acquainted. She stated clearly: “Now son, don’t you sign it. This ain’t our war. I won’t lose you.” Holland looked up at me with his square, beautiful face and took a sip from his tea and then we could hear it: the ice clinking in his shaking hand. Poor frightened young men, being called off to battle. Like townspeople watching a cyclone headed toward them, you could feel it coming: the end of youth.
“What do you think, Pearlie?” he asked me. He dabbed a handkerchief across his forehead, which had darkened in the summer sun. Drops of sweat shone in his hair.
Holland, do you remember my shocked silence? How I sat there in the rocking chair and said nothing? A bee was trapped in a lantern, buzzing like a bank alarm. We rocked back and forth to the radio, which was playing “Good As I Been to You,” of all sad things. I finally got up the nerve to look over at you. Your beautiful face, your frightened hand. I knew what I wanted, but I had no idea if I had a right to want it, and I had no way of saying: Don’t go, I need you. What was my life without you? All I said was “Oh!” You stared at me and seemed to understand, and it was all we ever spoke about the matter.
The Story of a Marriage Page 5
