The Color of Family

by Patricia Jones

  Ellie laid her fork on the side of her plate, then looked squarely at Aaron and said, sternly, “So what are you saying, Aaron? You really think that what Ma’s been saying all this time is true? Because I just can’t talk to you if that’s where this is headed. Besides, do you know how few babies are born exactly nine months later to the day of conception? As an obstetrician, I can tell you that very, very few are.” And she had the determination of someone ready to walk out.

  “No, Ellie, I’m not saying I believe her. What I am saying, though, is that before you slap a CRAZY WOMAN, KEEP YOUR DISTANCE sign on her back, we should have a little more patience with her point of view, especially in light of what Poppa just said. I’ve already set her straight about not coming to my job anymore with this stuff, and she understands that she crossed a line when she did that.”

  Ellie, with her fork in midair, gave Aaron a stunned stare, as if she had misheard, or he had misspoken. Then, with a tone too calm to be real, she said, “What? Are you telling me that she came to the station ready to go on the air with this nonsense? You didn’t tell me about this.”

  “Well, no Ellie, I didn’t tell you about it. I guess her coming to the station was trumped by Agnes calling to invite her to lunch, and when I called you, that was the only thing I had on my mind. Besides, she didn’t come there ready to put anything on the air. It wasn’t like that at all. She just came there to let me hear a tape recording she had made of Agnes Cannon’s visit. For some reason Ma thought that in the conversation Agnes had all but outright admitted that Clayton Cannon was Emeril’s son. In actuality, though, she never admitted anything of the sort. Never even came close. But she just wanted me to hear the tape, that’s all.” Then Aaron looked to his father for help of any kind, a look of empathy, or even as little as a half-smile of encouragement. All he got in return, though, was his father’s even eyes that were filled with the resolve of a man, Aaron knew, who had long ago made his peace with having spent the better part of his years loving Antonia while the ghosts of Clayton and Agnes, but most of all Emeril, hovered always right alongside them.

  “Well, this is just unbelievable!” Ellie said, her ire clearly visible. “Do you see what I mean now? Do you see what I mean about her actions creating situations that could have ugly consequences?” Then she turned to her father, nearly sticking her head full in Maggie’s face, and said, “Poppa, did you know about this?”

  “Yes, Ellen, honey, I did know. It wasn’t a big deal. No harm was done and I don’t think it requires you to overreact about it” was all Junior would say.

  “Well, I just don’t know what to say. I don’t know when any of you will start listening to me,” and up she jumped from the table in an explosion of tears, squeezing her belly past her father and running into the kitchen.

  Rick got up to follow her, but Aaron stopped him when he stood. “Just let me handle this, Rick. Just give me a few minutes with her.”

  “But she’s so upset,” Rick said sharply.

  “It’s mostly the hormones,” Maggie said flatly, as she continued to eat. “She’ll be okay as soon as she cries out whatever it is she’s crying about, and believe me, she may not even know.”

  Aaron went into the kitchen unsure of which form Ellie’s temper had taken. He’d heard Maggie’s account of hormones, which gave his mind a reason for the tears that rarely flowed from his sister’s stubbornly dry eyes. Still, her ire could have been in his kitchen blasting every felt emotion like so much spewing hot-spring water, or simply sitting there trapped inside her anger like torpid pond water that’s given up on any hope of trying to move from nature’s unmovable binds; there was no telling, even if she had been in her ordinary condition because when it came down to their mother—and only when it came to their mother—Ellie’s emotions were red-raw and volatile. So it was only when he walked nearer to her that he saw she was shaking as if the room had become a deep freeze. He put his arm around her for warmth and comfort, then asked with a calm that went beyond calm, “Why are you in such a state about this, Ellie?”

  She sucked in a generous breath, then deflated herself and said, “Because I’m tired, Aaron. I’m just so tired of trying to make that man not matter.”

  And Aaron thought about his own futile attempts to do the same before saying, “Yeah, I know. But the fact is, Ellie, he does matter. So now what? What are you afraid of? Because being tired of trying to make him matter would not make you shake with this kind of terror.”

  She looked up at him with surprised eyes, then looked off, as if in shame. “I’m scared, Aaron, because in four weeks I’m supposed to give birth to this little boy—”

  “A boy, Ellie?” Aaron said louder than he immediately knew he should have. Then he brought himself down a level or two before continuing, “You didn’t tell me it was a boy.”

  “We didn’t tell anybody. But I especially didn’t tell Ma, because I’m so afraid, Aaron, that when this baby is born, she’ll have a grandson she can’t fully love because that damned man is taking up too much of her mind space and heart space. And I won’t know how to explain that to him as he grows.”

  Aaron hugged his sister a little closer then said with a softness filled with shared and unspoken memories, “I don’t think it works like that. I think a mother always finds room in her heart for her children and her grandchildren. At least that’s what I want to believe.” And the possibility of the truth being vastly different, the same thought he’d always danced on and off with, sent a momentary fear through him that he desperately needed to beat back, so he repeated, “No, it just doesn’t work like that.”

  “Doesn’t it, Aaron? I mean think about it. Did you really feel, when we were growing up, that you had Ma’s full and undistracted attention?”

  Aaron’s face grew smooth as he thought about the question of his mother’s distractedness, and he knew his answer would take far longer than either he or Ellie would have ever anticipated. It would veer him off down paths that would wind and twist and gnarl into more questions too hefty for his slight sister, particularly in her state and condition, to take on. So he took his arm back because he needed it for his own succor, then rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I don’t know, Ellie. It just seems to me that none of that matters now. It’s in the past. I mean, do we really want to drag all of that up as if it could possibly change anything now? Growing up was growing. Now is now.”

  “And now, we need to settle this once and for all,” Ellie said as she clutched Aaron’s forearm desperately. “If we take her and have her evaluated and the doctor says that she’s perfectly fine, which I doubt he will, then I’ll drop this whole thing, Aaron. I swear I will. I just need to know if she’s got some kind of imbalance going on that would explain all these years of my life.”

  “What do you mean, Ellie? Something like an obsessive-compulsive disorder?”

  “Yes, exactly. Something just like that.”

  “I don’t know, Ellie,” Aaron said, wrestling with every part of his mind that gripped the dilemma.

  “And you know what? It may even be chemical!” she said with an enthusiasm that seemed to have the purpose of giving her plan validity and acceptability.

  And finally, a good enough reason, Aaron thought. It may be chemical. “Well, I guess you’re right about that. Let me go talk to Poppa.” Aaron left his sister’s side and walked with slowness to the door. He turned to see her once more just before he went through, still with doubt, because there was that part of his memory that will never let go of the time when he was four and Ellie was nine and she told him that his socks walked around by themselves at night when he went to sleep. She told him then with the same passion she was now using to convince him of something far more sobering. Back then, the only fallout from her exaggeration was a solid month of him not being able to sleep at the baby-sitter’s, since he stayed up practically all night to catch his socks in their frolicking act. That went on until one night, tired and barely able to keep his face out of his dinner plate,
Aaron was remembering, he finally asked his mother about the walking socks and learned that Ellie had lied. She got a sharp and immediate punishment for the lie. This time, though, if Ellie was exaggerating and leading him down a path behind a band of walking socks, she would leave behind a messy trail of ill will, the likes of which he knew she has never known from their mother. But right now, her look—that was less of a nudge than a two-armed shove with all her might—sent him the rest of the way into the dining room. And all he needed to do was enter the room to command everyone’s eyes on him. So he went back to his chair and sat, saying, “Poppa, I need to talk to you about what Ellie and I were discussing in there.”

  “All right, son. I’m listening.”

  “Well, Ellie brought up what I think is an excellent point, and that is that maybe Ma could have some sort of chemical imbalance that makes her do so many odd things.”

  Junior ate the last morsel of food from his plate, leaving it looking nearly clean enough to put back on the cupboard without a washing, then said, “Aaron, I don’t know how you and your sister are seeing things, but I don’t think what your mother does would really qualify as ‘so many odd things.’ I mean, yeah, she goes on and on about it, but you don’t have as many years with it as I do, so you don’t know how to become numb to it. Now, I hear your mother talking and going on and on, because God knows she talks all the time, but I don’t start listening until she gets to a point. That goes for this and for everything, because everything with her is something. I just thought you kids had done the same thing. But if it bothers you that much, then I’ll go along with whatever you two want to do.”

  Aaron put a forkful of collard greens in his mouth, then labored to chew them, shocked by their coldness. He took a sip of cola that was but a thin film of water on the top from the melting ice. Then, resting his fork on his plate, he looked firmly at his father and said, “Poppa, Ma would kill me if she knew that I was telling you this—”

  “Then don’t tell me.”

  “No, I have to tell you, just so that you can see the odd behavior we’re talking about that just might be caused by a chemical imbalance.” He cinched his forehead, thinking for only the briefest second about the trust he was about to breach, then said, “Whenever you go down to Tulane to your board meetings, Ma moves all the furniture around in the house. And she’s been doing this for years. I know because I help her do it.”

  Junior gave Aaron a sideways stare with a twisted smile, then let loose a burst of a guffaw. “You think I don’t know what she does when I leave town after forty-two years of being married to that woman, and then knowing her forever before that?”

  “You know?”

  “Of course I know. I also know that she’s been feeding those prostitutes out on the boulevard for the last two years, too. But I’ve known about the furniture for years.” He pointed a playful finger of shame at his son and said, “But I didn’t know you were helping her. I’m not quite sure how I figured she did all that moving, or for that matter exactly what she moved, but I had no idea you were her partner in crime.”

  Aaron let his hands drop into his lap as his shoulders slumped south. Cocking his head sideways, he turned to his father and said, “How in the world did you know?”

  “Oh, just in little things. Like the way she never really moves everything back to where it’s supposed to be. Some things will be a little askew, and some things are in an altogether different place. The funny thing is, I’ll put them back in their right place and she doesn’t even notice. After a couple dozen times of coming home and finding things out of place only to have to fix them, I started to put it all together.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell her that you know? I mean, if you told her that you know, then maybe she wouldn’t have to do it all the time and then she could rearrange the furniture just the way she wants it.”

  “Well now, why would I do that? I like my furniture just the way it is. The way things are now works just fine. She gets what she wants when I’m away, and when I come back, my house is just the way I want it.”

  Aaron smiled sardonically, letting his eyes fall into his lap. He almost told his father his true thoughts on such lunacy, but he thought better of it when he remembered that it had very little to do with the matter at hand. So he looked head-on at his father and said, “Well, are you for it, Poppa? Do you agree with Ellie and me—but mostly Ellie—that Ma needs to see a professional about this thing with Clayton Cannon?”

  Junior rose slowly from where he sat, then stepped to one side and slid his chair to the table. He put his hand on Aaron’s shoulder, then squeezed with what seemed to be the warmth of a father feeling the pain of his son. “I don’t see where it could hurt things. I do love your mother, but I am a medical man too, so I do take into consideration that there could be a chemical imbalance that would explain so many things about her that I could never make heads nor tails of about her except simply to say that it was just her way. The problem might be getting her there, though. But you kids go ahead and do what you think you need to do.” He let go of Aaron’s shoulder and gave him a soft pat on his back. And as he walked past Rick he did the same. Then he went to the chair that sat in the living room, just beyond the indiscernible demarcation where the dining room becomes the living room, and picked up his coat. As he snaked his arms into the sleeves he gave his son a fair enough warning. “I’ve got to get on home now, but I just want you to remember one thing, son. I know your mother, and the one thing you can count on is that she’s going to kick and holler and resist this; and even through all of that, if you do manage to get her to a doctor, she will carry a grudge against you and your sister as if it had handles. So, if you two are prepared to deal with that, then go through with this and I will be right there with all of you. Just do me a favor. Go in there and ask Ellie who she’s planning to take her to see, because if it’s somebody over at the hospital chances are good that your mother and I will know him, and that wouldn’t be a comfortable situation for your mother at all.”

  Aaron rose and went swiftly into the kitchen. And when he walked through the door, he didn’t immediately find his sister. So he called for her, and when he heard her whimpering answer and then saw her bent over the counter, clutching her stomach, he went completely cold. Every instinct he had to scream was taken over by his inability to accept that there was something wrong. “Ellie, what is it?” he asked quickly.

  “It’s the baby, Aaron. Tell Rick that I’m in labor.”

  Aaron said nothing as he turned on his heels and left the kitchen as steady as flowing brook-water. But when he got back into the dining room, all evenness was lost when he bellowed at Rick, as if Rick should have sensed that his baby was on its way, “Come on, man, get in there! Ellie’s in labor, and she cannot have that baby in the kitchen! It’s not due for a week and being born on a kitchen floor is just not going to be a good thing for it.” Aaron sat down at the table before his pounding heart would steal away every ounce of strength that kept his knees from completely buckling beneath him. He slumped back in the chair and watched as everyone hustled, and listened as the whirl of wind in the room became more indefinable and muffled. And all the commotion to call the doctor and get her to the hospital made him angry—angry that Ellie had to bring her mulish self out on a night like this, angry that his mother had preordained this night so many years before. But mostly, he was seething with a newly steeped hatred at the fate that brought his stark nemesis, who was the only living creature standing between him and his mother, right there to Baltimore again, only fifteen minutes away and almost near enough to touch.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Antonia took jerky, skittish steps, as she approached the bench in front of the Science Center where she’d sat just a few weeks before, watching the door of the Harbor Court Towers for a glimpse of Clayton. She was at least twenty minutes early, and it was the middle of January, for goodness sakes, far too cold to sit on the bench as if it were a lazy, balmy day just right for w
atching strollers. And so it was no wonder that she caught more than a few stares of passersby. But she couldn’t feel the cold. Her mind had ducked inside and taken the elevator up to the penthouse—he had to live in the penthouse because that’s what tortured musical geniuses do—and into Clayton’s musical retreat.

  She had fashioned him as tortured since she’d tried to imagine him as a young man studying piano at Peabody. Tormented in his world of notes, sharps and flats, majors and minors—mostly minors—with no one truly able to understand what drove his soul. Tortured in the way in which he, himself, couldn’t fully understand his genius—all he knew, as she imagined him, was that he had to play, and if he didn’t, he’d die. Mostly, though, angst-ridden because there was a cavernous gap in the soul that he tried desperately to fill with music, written from the beleaguered souls of others. To be in that world in which he lived, of formal music written, at least initially, for patrician ears, would require a meticulous high-brow mystique foreign to the average bayou man. And inside his music den, which must have been darkened, lit only by sparkling crystal chandeliers, were old paintings of famous composers and furniture no one could ever picture fitting with ease into their own home; and busts—only one of himself—of some such stone or bronze carved with immortality in mind, she was sure. A place that was decorated as if no one from recent centuries had been inside it, except for the table, set for some sort of imminent formal meal—because in her mind, that’s how he took his meals. Alone. Solitary. And his repast was heavy with the aura of the long-ago communality of souls once he filled it with their music.