Susan stood straight and settled her hands on her hips. “You know I don’t like that modern stuff, Clayton. Half of it looks like it belongs in the waiting lounge for a shuttle to outer space. All that glass and chrome, and chairs that look like they’re not meant to hold a bottom for longer than five minutes. Why you’d think that they’d never even heard of wood.”
“I’m not saying it has to be modern, just more updated.”
“I like our antiques. That clock is an antique, Clayton.”
“And there is no law that says every antique is a beautiful one, Susan. That thing is just plain old ugly. All I’m saying is that maybe we can update the look of our home without going too far in the modern direction. I love antiques just as much as you, but I like attractive antiques. I just want us to get some attractive antiques in here.”
“Well fine, Clayton,” she said as she turned to go back into the kitchen. “Let me get the rest of dinner on, now.”
Once she left, Agnes came through the swinging door so quickly Clayton wondered how it could have happened without them crashing headlong into one another. He followed his mother’s movements intently as she placed another dish in the middle of the table, then asked, “So what’s that?”
“It’s kale. I made it,” Agnes said, as if to assure her son of something.
“Oh” was all Clayton said at first. Then he continued, “Did you make it the way Susan makes hers? Because I like the way Susan makes it. She sautés her kale with onions and garlic and pepper sauce instead of boiling it with meat.”
Agnes took her son in with seeming incredulity, then replied, “I made it the way I make kale. You ate it when you were a boy; now all of a sudden my kale’s not good enough for you?”
Clayton only laughed, nearly under his breath, then said, “Momma, in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been a boy for some time now, and I’ve had a lot of years eating Susan’s kale, that’s all.”
“Ummf,” was all Agnes said before she went back into the kitchen. And when she walked right back in behind Susan, with the twins trailing behind her, she went to her seat for dinner, settled herself, and said to Susan before her daughter-in-law could get into her chair, “All of a sudden, my kale isn’t good enough for him now. He wants your kale.”
“Oh, Mother Cannon, I’m sure Clayton still loves your kale, don’t you Clayton?”
“Of course I do, Momma. I never said I didn’t love your kale.” And he thought to say that he simply had his mouth set on tasting Susan’s kale, but he couldn’t see how that would make anything better, so he simply left things as they were. He reached past Noah for his mother’s kale, then scooped a good helping of the soupy limp greens—that had been cooked to their certain death and hardly resembled their former form—onto his plate. He gave the dish to Noah, and before he had anything else on his plate, before they had even blessed the food, Clayton took a forkful of greens and ate them eagerly. “Wow, Momma! This sure does bring back memories, come to think of it. They sure are good.”
Agnes gave her son a smile that said she had been duly placated. “Thank you, baby.”
“So, Momma,” Clayton said as he proceeded to dish more food onto his plate, “how come you didn’t go back to New Orleans once I left for Europe?”
“Oh, well honey, I just wanted to spend more time with my beautiful boys here,” she said in a way that said that was all she would say.
But Clayton was clearly expecting more. He looked at his mother with questioning eyes, then at Susan who was watching Agnes in much the same way. So he shifted his gaze back to his mother and said, “Well, what did you all do?”
Agnes put the spoon back in the bowl of kale, then placed her hands in her lap like an uncertain child being taken to task for her actions. “We just spent time together, Clayton. Susan went to dinner and the boys and I stayed here and played cards and popped popcorn. There aren’t many other details to tell you.”
Then Susan, as she plucked boiled potatoes from a dish, said, “Speaking of that dinner, Momma, I got the distinct impression that there was some tension between you and that woman you were having lunch with that day. I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. What in the world were the two of you talking about? Because you sure were agitated enough.”
“We were just having a disagreement about something that happened in the past, darling, that’s all. She saw things one way, and I saw them another.” She looked at Clayton, and then to the opposite end of the table at Susan and defended herself. “That does happen, you know?”
“Oh, of course it does, Mother Cannon,” Susan said as if to assure her mother-in-law that she wasn’t accusing her of anything. “I was just wondering, is all. I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Well, everything was just fine. Who’s going to say grace?”
“I’ll say it, Grandma,” Noah said.
“Isn’t that just like my good boys,” she said, giving them a grandmother’s fawning smile, as if Noah and Luke were one, no matter what, just by virtue of having been born together.
Glancing around the table, Noah began, “Dear Lord, make us truly thankful for the food we’re about to receive for the nourishment of our bodies. Amen.”
“Wasn’t that just wonderful?” Agnes said, her voice filled with inflated pride.
“That was quite nice, son,” Clayton said as he cut into his meat. Then he turned to his mother, still with her contentious visit with her friend on his mind, and went to inquire but was cut off by Susan.
“What was your friend’s name, anyway, Mother Cannon? I forgot it.”
But since Agnes didn’t rush to answer, it gave Noah plenty of opportunity to blurt out, “Antonia. Her name was Antonia. Right, Grandma?”
“Yes, that’s right, honey.”
“She has a nice face,” Noah said. “I think she liked us.”
“Of course she liked you,” Agnes said, smiling at the boys. “What’s not to like about you two sweeties?”
Clayton was barely aware that he was staring dead ahead into the meat in the center of the table when his gaze was disrupted by the intensity of Susan’s attention on him. But she would have to wait. All that mattered to him in that particular moment was the Antonia he had met. And how could it be happenstance, he wondered, that two women from New Orleans—one knowing his mother, the other drifting into him at Harbor Place—could be two separate women. Chance simply wasn’t that profound. When his eyes did make their way to Susan’s and slid into them, he could see that she wanted to know what was the matter; what had sent him off to a most distant place. But Antonia had now become another name, like Emeril, that had come to epitomize a mystery that had long ago perched itself over his life; like the raven, nevermore. And all he knew about this mystery, the only thing possible for him to know, was that it had roots that were planted deep. And it was the very nature of the mystery that always made him question his state of consciousness in the back of that funeral car so many years before. Perhaps, he thought—particularly now with a completely formed woman named Antonia haunting and overtaking his every thought—he was indeed asleep that day when he thought he’d heard his grandmother suggest that his father was someone different than the man they’d just put into the ground.
So he snapped out of the stupor and sliced off a bite of meat from his plate, but before he would eat it, he asked his mother, “So what did you and this friend Antonia talk about that caused so much tension between you two?”
Agnes set her fork down in what seemed to be certain frustration. And when she’d finally swallowed the bite she had been chewing, she answered, “Clayton, there are far, far more interesting things for us to discuss than some boring old lunch I had with an old friend. Why don’t you tell us about your concert tour? How was it? Did you get standing ovations at every performance?”
“Momma, it was no different than any other tour I do over there. Self-important, self-believing aristocracy are the worst sycophants on earth. That is, of course, until I leav
e and then they can talk about what an unsophisticated, boorish American I am with my southern drawl and simple clothes.”
“That’s what makes you so much better than them,” Agnes said. “You’re brilliant, and yet you still have the elegance to be humble. Not like those wine-swilling pigs.”
“Brilliance and elegance are subjective ideals, Momma,” Clayton pointed out with a certain unease in his voice that slid into his countenance. This was what had bothered him most about his mother through the years. She had the most irksome way of showing her devotion to him with praise while vilifying anyone she could on the periphery, whether she had just cause or not. And there were times when it made her praise of him lack sincerity. But he didn’t want to think about that, so he simply continued, “Even as hard as it is for me to admit it, I think we have to assume that every European is not arrogant Euro-trash.”
“I’m not saying they’re all like that, Clayton. I’m just saying that so many of them think that all they have to be is European to be elegant.”
“And you know this based on what, Momma?” Clayton asked firmly.
“Just based on the way they seem,” she said, sounding a bit wounded. And then she lashed back, “I’m giving you a compliment and somehow I end up being attacked and accused of I don’t know what.”
“Oh, Mother Cannon,” Susan interrupted. “Nobody’s attacking you or accusing you of anything. Are you Clayton?” and she gave Clayton a hard-eyed mother’s glare for misbehavior.
“Of course I’m not accusing her or attacking her. I just don’t want her going around saying something like that to the wrong people. It only takes one misspoken word to be the lead story on the news with this town being so absolutely, unexplainably captivated with me moving here. I’ll tell you, I don’t get it. I’m like the Cal Ripken of classical music, or something in this town.”
“Well, I’m not stupid, Clayton. I would never say something like that outside of this room with just you and Susan and the boys. What do you think I’m going to do, go across the street and shout it from the steps of the Science Center?”
“Now you’re being ridiculous, Momma.”
And just the way a child knows how to bring the spotlight of their family’s attention directly onto themselves, Luke interrupted with what would seem to most others as incongruous kid-talk when he said, “Today at school, the teacher asked me and Noah to tell the class about New Orleans since Daddy is from there and going down there to play a concert.”
“Did she, now,” Susan said interestedly, as if she were relieved to be drawn into anything other than the nitpicking of Clayton and his mother. “So what did you tell them?”
“We told them about Mardi Gras, and we told them about the music that’s special only to New Orleans.”
“That’s right,” Luke said. “And we also told them about funerals, right Noah?”
“Yeah, we sure did. We told them about how some people have parades and Dixieland bands to take them to the graveyard. And they laughed and thought we weren’t even telling the truth, Daddy.” And the boys giggled until everyone else joined them.
But then Luke sobered up and asked his father earnestly, “But, Daddy, they wanted to know why they carried on like that for somebody who’s died, like they’re happy the person died, or something? Why do they do that?”
“Well, we’re not happy when people die,” Agnes told her grandsons. “What we’re doing is giving the people a good send-off to heaven. That’s what it’s all about. We want to make sure they go off to heaven with their spirits high.”
“That’s real nice,” Noah said, seeming to grasp wholly its profundity. “Did you all do that for Grandpa Cannon’s funeral, Grandma?”
“Well, no. Grandpa wanted a traditional funeral with limousines and regular church music. He was a very Catholic man, and way too conservative to be a child of New Orleans,” Agnes said with a hearty laugh that seemed to come directly from her memories. She smiled at Clayton, then at the boys and continued, “Anyway, he didn’t go for all that—as he called it—‘hoopin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on.’”
“Grandpa sounds funny,” Luke said with a little boy’s giggle.
“He was funny in his own way,” Agnes said fondly.
Clayton said nothing as he ate determinedly while his mind, in spite of his efforts to halt it, harked back to his father, and with everything in him that he could remember, he couldn’t recall one time in which he would have considered his father possessed of any kind of humor—not even in his own way. He remembered a man, quiet and retiring and quite innocuous, but a man who nonetheless had a very strong marriage to his beliefs, and issues in which he did not believe, as Clayton had come to think of it, were simply wrong in Douglas Cannon’s eyes. That was the thing that always made the man’s condemnations so confusing for Clayton as a boy living in Douglas’s presence and as a man living with him as memory. His father was never very fired-up in the telling of where he stood regarding anything, but it was oh so clear that what he said came from some simmering heat at his core.
For some reason he could never seem to understand this one moment out of all the others, and that Clayton couldn’t forget. It contrasted the strength of his father’s convictions with the meekness of his spirit. During the family news-watching hour, his father stared with plain, impenetrably cold eyes at the bleak faces of Mexican migrant workers, some of them as young as new money, some as old as the legacy of bigotry, who were a ragtag clan dressed in tatters of clothes that only had a vague resemblance of their former lives. Clayton watched his father as nothing—not the old, not even the young—seemed to stir any emotion regarding the sentimentality of humanism. And all of it was made to look even more abysmal rendered in grainy black-and-white sixties’ television news. “America is for Americans.” Clayton could still hear his father’s determined, yet impassive judgment about the Mexicans as it floated softly amidst the thin light of the television in the darkened living room, while father and son reclined in the contented stupor of their well-fed bellies. Could he see the disparity of fortune? Clayton now wondered about things he, himself, only understood clearly from the turret of his manhood. Still, he heard his father’s voice, judging and pitiless, but always docile in its tone: “If things are so bad here, they should go on back where they came from.” Yes, Clayton thought with a weakened smile as he pondered the humorless man, Douglas Cannon was one of those—the kind who might not be impassioned enough to actually lynch a man, yet he would never do anything to stop it.
So Clayton finished his meal without saying a word against what his mother most likely had to believe about his father. And he supposed, as he cleaned the last morsel of food from his plate with his fork and ate the last piece of his dinner roll, that the only thing left once a man is dead, the only thing that matters after the fact, are the pictures in the hearts and minds of those who loved him. If his mother’s perception was of a man who had even an ounce of funny in him, then who was he, as the son, to negate that opinion?
And with the swiftness of a shifting wind, Clayton went back to what was important. “So tell me about this Antonia woman, Momma. What’s her last name?”
“It’s Jackson, if that’s important at all.”
As hard as Clayton tried, all he could remember about the woman’s name was Antonia. But that was enough. These two women had to be the same. So he continued, “Well, it’s important because I met a woman named Antonia. Maybe it’s the same one.”
Agnes turned slowly to see Clayton, then stared at him as if she were looking at him from another realm. “Where did you meet a woman named Antonia?”
“Over at Harbor Place. We had lunch together. She told me that she had followed my career since the beginning. She’s from New Orleans too. It must be the same woman. She’s about five-foot-five, she’s a black woman with sort of a light brown complexion and she’s got a short haircut. Is that her?”
“That sounds like what she looked like,” Noah said.
�
��Well so, Momma. Was that her? I mean, if it was, then why didn’t she tell me that she knew you?”
Agnes answered nervously. “Well, Clayton, what are the chances that it was the same woman? I mean, for goodness sakes, there must be a million Antonias running around the world as we speak.”
“I don’t know,” Clayton said skeptically. “It just seems like too much of a coincidence to me for it to really be one.”
“Well, that’s all it can be,” Agnes said sternly as she studied her plate while she ate. “It’s not the same woman.”
And so Clayton understood that this would be the last word on the matter. To press it would make it all become futilely frustrating, and there was not much point he could see to going through that much angst with his mother only for it to end up being exactly what she said—a coincidence. So Clayton pushed away from the table, and just as he stood, said, “Well, I’m going to excuse myself now, if you all don’t mind. I want to take a drive around the city to get to know it again.”
“You want more to eat?” Susan asked.
Clayton smiled at the southern womanliness that compelled her to ask him the same thing after every meal, as if he didn’t have the sense God gave a goose to know when he wanted more to eat, much less how to ask for it. But he nonetheless responded as he went over and kissed the boys on the tops of their heads. “No, thank you, honey. I’m all set. I expect to be back before you turn in, but if I’m not, don’t wait up for me.” When he reached Susan, he bent and gave her a kiss that lasted just long enough to be decent viewing for other eyes. Then he stood straight and blew a kiss to his mother. “I’ll see you in the morning, Momma.”
Clayton went to the living room and called down to the garage for his car. He left, giving one last good-bye to them all. He closed the door softly behind him and stepped across the hall to ring for the elevator. When the doors slid open there was only one man in it, and Clayton stepped to the back wall. From where he stood, he had a peripheral view of the man. It didn’t take Clayton long to realize that the man was who he thought he was, except he couldn’t remember his name. All he knew was that he was a Baltimore Oriole and quite a player. This he knew from the times the birds would fly into town—or at least his former town, New York—to take on the Yankees and this was the only other player, aside from Ripken the golden boy, who always had a New York press microphone stuck in his face. And isn’t it a shame, Clayton reflected, that even all the way in New York, that Ripken name was trapped in his consciousness for no other reason than the legacy. He looked up at the floor indicator and saw that they were closing in on the lobby, so Clayton quickly said, “Say, aren’t you one of the Orioles?”
The Color of Family Page 24
