The Color of Family

by Patricia Jones

  Aaron and his father followed Ellen in silence as she walked five paces ahead of them. Considering how far along she was in the pregnancy, Aaron thought, who knew she could move that fast; and he knew what had gotten her moving. What good are intentions if you end up still wounding, he thought. His intention hadn’t been to touch her exposed nerve with his curt comment about her and Rick. It’s just that, without him being aware all these years, it seemed his umbrage for Rick had made a home right on the surface of his subconscious, close enough to be summoned whenever he knew, or didn’t know, he needed to remember. But Rick and Ellen had recovered from the time of their discontent, and she was filled up with his child, for heaven’s sake. So he needed to get over it. But that wasn’t so easy, since he remembered that night when he drowned in her tears that were filled with the torment and fever of a woman betrayed.

  When they reached the cafeteria, Aaron stopped, then looked up at the sign that said BLALOCK BUILDING with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction from which they’d walked. He turned to his father and said, “Poppa, remember when you worked down there in the Blalock Building?”

  “Sure,” Junior said, looking wistfully down the hall. “Boy, I remember when I did my first surgery. It was on this young guy who had broken both his ankles in a motorcycle accident, and I remember going down to that big white statue of Jesus and rubbing his feet and praying for him to guide my hands through the surgery.” Junior held the door for Aaron to walk through, then laughed quietly. “Worked, too. Those ankles were masterpieces. To this day he calls me and tells me how perfect they are and how he has arthritis in nearly every joint in his body except those two ankles.”

  Aaron smiled, not knowing if he should have believed in the miracle of God answering direct pleas or in the precision of his father’s skill. He decided, instead, to chock it up to the luck of that hobbled guy’s draw, in whichever way he was graced, and leave it at that. When they got into the cafeteria, Aaron followed his father, who followed Ellen to the stack of trays and picked one. As they approached the food, he looked questioningly at it, chuckled lightly, then said in a near whisper, “Boy, nothing smells good in here.”

  “Tell me about it,” Ellen said with as much quiet. “No matter how hungry I get, this place never makes my mouth water. But it’s here, and it’s convenient, and so I’ll find something I can eat.”

  Junior strained to see what the dish was that had something swimming in tomato sauce, then looked at Aaron, then Ellen and replied, “The food here’s not so bad. Try coming out of a surgery that went on longer than you expected, and you’re hungry as a horse. Then see if this food doesn’t taste like a gift from heaven.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Aaron said. He smiled at the humorless woman on the other side of the counter who had served up eggplant Parmesan for Ellen and his father, and said, “I’ll take the eggplant Parmesan too, please.” Then he got some broccoli and an apple. And when it came time to pay, his father stepped in front of Ellen. No matter how old he and Ellen got, Aaron thought with a shadow of a smile, his father would always have to take care of things, take care of them.

  “I’m paying for all three of us,” Junior said to the cashier.

  And as Aaron watched his father open his wallet and take care of his children, just as he’d seen him do more times than was feasible to count in the years since he was a boy, he knew what kind of father he wanted to be when the day would come—if the day were ever to come, he thought.

  He followed the leader to a table in the middle of the room where he sat opposite his father; and just like the others, he got right to the business of eating. As he chewed, Aaron glanced over at his father and sensed an immediate contentment that he now recalled he always felt when he remembered his father as the one invariable presence that gave perfect balance to the family. There was no telling what would have become of him and Ellen if all they’d had from the beginning was their mother with Clayton Cannon right in front of her blocking their complete access to her; the wall they’d have had to wear down before they could even get to her. But they didn’t have just her, he thought with an internal glow. She was there loving them right up to the heights to which she could love them before her distraction, and then there was their father taking up where she had slacked off.

  The attention. It was all in the awareness his father had. Aaron couldn’t speak for Ellen and so couldn’t know for certain, but it was quite evident that she was a doctor because her father was a doctor. But for Aaron, it was the memory of the day his father read a ten-page report of a paper Aaron wrote for his high-school civics class, then asked him if he had an interest in being a journalist and writing about politics. It was in that seemingly clairvoyant question that Aaron knew without doubt that his father had been aware of him, because only someone so present could know that the thought of bringing the world together in some way through his thoughts and words had struck something deep in him long before. And though he hadn’t necessarily named it journalism, his father certainly hit it squarely in the center. His mother, he recalled with a smile that slid only to the right corner of his face, once told him that he talked enough to be a lawyer, and that was all.

  Since he knew they were bound to ask, Aaron simply gathered his thoughts and revealed them. “Listen, Poppa, Ellie. I swear, I know this breakup of me and Maggie is a shock, but check it out. No part of my opinion ever mattered with her, which always made me wonder why she even wanted to be with me.”

  Ellen looked at him with a puzzled head-cock, then replied, “Which makes me wonder why you stayed around as a boyfriend.”

  “Well, maybe that’s another story,” Aaron said with a certain embarrassment as he stared distractedly into his eggplant Parmesan. “Anyway, I finally reached a point midway through the relationship where I had to constantly say to myself, ‘Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy? Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?’ It was finally just worth it to me to be happy, even though God knows I would have loved to have been right once in a while.”

  Junior looked up from his food and said, “Well now, son, that’s just the nature of a relationship. That’s certainly not going to change with a new girlfriend, or even a wife. Every man has to accept that he’s just not going to be right, and that’s that.”

  Ellen shot her father a perturbed glance before saying, “Well, like what kinds of things didn’t matter?”

  “I never told you about the time I wanted to surprise her and take her to Hawaii for a week.”

  “Yeah, you told me. But I thought those plans fell through,” Ellen replied.

  “Well, they fell through after I did some major maneuvering to see to it that we could be off the same week. I had everything in order.”

  “So she resented you for manipulating her schedule like that?” Ellen guessed.

  “No. No, nothing like that, Ellie. She was mad at me because I was wrong for planning a long trip to Hawaii when we could fly for only three hours to the Caribbean. I wasn’t thinking practically, she told me. Said I was being a controlling man for making the decision for her to be in the air all those hours.”

  “Maybe she’s afraid of flying for that long,” Junior offered as an excuse.

  “Maybe she just had to be right, but mostly I had to be wrong,” Aaron said as truth.

  “Well, I have to admit, Aaron, even with as much as I like Maggie, that is pretty bitchy,” Ellen said. “So, I guess things do make better sense to me now.”

  “Yeah, well you know something else? It finally dawned on me that it was always like it is with Ma. I have to just be wrong—and happy.”

  “God, Aaron, Ma wasn’t that bad,” Ellen replied with her eyes focused on Aaron. Then she softened her stare and asked pleadingly, “Was she?”

  Aaron looked plainly over the rim of his water glass as he sipped, and when he finished and set it down, he said, “From where I’ve always stood in my wrongness, she was.”

  “Oh, now come on,” Junio
r finally said. “Stop going at your mother like that. It’s not so much that your mother always has to be right. It’s just that she’s tenacious, and tenacity, in any form, can make anybody appear to be what they’re not.”

  And then, as if the question had come from nowhere, Aaron finally asked, “What if the doctor doesn’t find anything wrong with Ma?”

  Junior cleared his throat and said, “Well, for certain he’s not going to find anything wrong. So what are you going to do, Ellen?”

  Ellen laid her fork on the side of her plate and finished chewing. But it was in the way she chewed and glared at her father that told of the ire in what she would say. When her bite was swallowed, she looked sternly at her father and said, “Poppa, if you don’t think anything is wrong with her, then why are you here?”

  “I’m here, little girl, to support your mother. Do you have any idea what it feels like for her to have her children tell her she’s crazy?” He hesitated as if willing to give her the opportunity to contemplate before continuing, “Now, she’s been real big about this and hasn’t acted hurt, or anything, but I can tell you one thing, the Antonia I know is real hurt by this. But she’s a woman who’ll tap dance in the bowels of hell for her children. Why else do you think she’d go through with this?”

  Ellen’s eyes were trained on her father, then she shifted them, as if too full of disgrace to honor his truth. She smiled wryly and let out one loud hiccough of a laugh and said, “I never thought about why she agreed to come. I guess I just thought that maybe somewhere deep inside her she knew she was being a little neurotically obsessive about Clayton Cannon.”

  “Well, I’m telling you, the only thing she knows is that she’s right, or at least has every reason to believe she’s right. Whatever the case, she believes what she believes, and I don’t think it has anything to do with her having a chemical imbalance or just being plum nuts. When your mother gets hold of something she believes in, she clamps down on it like a pit bull.”

  “Like the prostitutes,” Aaron said softly.

  “What?” Ellen asked.

  He spoke up clearly and repeated, “Like the prostitutes. I said it’s just like Ma and those prostitutes out on the street that she’s gotten it fixed in her head she has to feed and take care of. She doesn’t like what they do and knows it’s wrong, but she believes as strongly as she’s ever believed in anything that they have a right to be safe and fed.”

  “Well, safe and fed is one thing,” Junior said as he sat himself a little taller in his chair, like the king of his domain. “But they’d just better not be safe and fed inside my home. She’d better not have them up in my house.”

  Ellen took her father in with a face that seemed to be filled with compassion for enduring something insufferable, then said, “Well, I don’t know if she has, Poppa, but you should prepare yourself for the possibility that she’s done that. I mean, if she’s moving furniture around when you’re away, and all, I think she just might have brought those girls in from the cold or heat from time to time.”

  “I don’t even want to think about it” was all Junior said.

  And Aaron didn’t want to think about any of it, yet couldn’t help himself. Since his sister had put the notion in his head that there could be an explanation, a physiological explanation, a psychiatric explanation for why his mother was the way she was, he had found within himself a place of tolerance where he could put her. Sure, she had only seen him from the periphery of her full frontal vision of Clayton, but there was a reason. There was no doubt that there were times when it seemed to him that Emeril was worth more to her dead than her own children were worth to her alive, but now there was something to explain it all. And no one could ever swear against the fact that she was a mother who loved passionately up to that point where her obsession intersected with that love, and then it simply idled right there at its height. So this Dr. Lillywhite will lay the justification for every single fact of his mother that, up until now, had been unexplainable and he will do it, Aaron thought with the most imperceptible of self-affirming nods, in a clinical way that could not possibly be refuted. Dr. Lillywhite, he thought, will hand over to him his life, put back together and wrapped up in reason. And this man of science will put to sleep with unassailable testimony, once and for all, the faith his mother had placed in that mythical white man being her dead twin brother’s long-lost son.

  The three had spent the balance of the time they had idling away in Ellen’s office, talking some about the more one-dimensional wonders of life, but mostly they sat in silence. Aaron dozed shallowly, while his father read, and Ellen wrote. And so now, as they sat in Dr. Lillywhite’s waiting room in silent anticipation, Aaron wondered what Ellen could possibly have been writing so intensely. Maybe, he thought, it was related to the baby, writing down in a journal every speck of nothing or something leading up to the moment the baby is born and then continuing on from there. And so what was this entry she wrote, he wondered. Most likely, he reasoned, it could only have been an account of the day we all took this unborn boy’s grandmother in to have her mind checked under the suspicion that it was wearing down.

  The door to Dr. Lillywhite’s office suddenly opened and a small bespectacled black man stood in its aperture writing and then reading something at the back of flipped-over pages attached to a clipboard; a man who immediately put Aaron in mind of archetypical victim of playground taunting. This was most likely an assistant, yet he whispered to his sister, “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Dr. Lillywhite,” she said impatiently. “Who do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t expect Dr. Lillywhite to be black.”

  “Why, because his name is Dr. Lillywhite?”

  And Aaron turned to face her fully with disbelief in his eyes that she wouldn’t find the notion reasonable, then said with certainty, “Yes.”

  Dr. Lillywhite looked up at the three of them, smiled in a way that seemed to hurt, as if smiling were most uncommon for him, and said, “Dr. Barrett, you and your family can come on in now.”

  So they went, one following the other, past Dr. Lillywhite who had moved to the side of the doorway, and into the office. Junior made his way with swiftness to the chair next to where Antonia sat, and Ellen sat next to him. Aaron had no choice but to accept the chair that was off to the side of the desk, right by the window.

  Dr. Lillywhite closed the door and went to his chair with a stiffened gait and sat. He flipped the pages of his clipboard until they were no longer bent back. He looked up, pushed his glasses farther on his nose, then smiled his seemingly pained smile again and said, “Well, after spending this day with Mrs. Jackson, I’ve been able to get a better grasp on the situation that has brought her to me.” He paused only long enough to give a special, knowing smile to Antonia, then continued, “She is under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the concert pianist Clayton Cannon is the son of her deceased twin brother.” He looked over at Aaron and came to a halt.

  And for as much as Aaron wanted him to stop talking, just shut up if he wasn’t simply going to say it, he needed him to say it. The anticipation put a bug-eyed stare on his face that looked as if Dr. Lillywhite was sucking the oxygen from the room. And Aaron felt as if he couldn’t breathe, or think. He just needed this done.

  So when Dr. Lillywhite tore his attention from Antonia’s stricken son, he continued, “This is evidently causing you concern, based on what you told me, Dr. Barrett, and what you told me, Dr. Jackson, you are all under the impression that she is obsessed with this man and wrong about him being her nephew. Well, I have run every test called for in this situation of suspected obsessive and/or delusional behavior, and in my findings there is nothing that tells me, or even hints at the possibility that she is suffering from any kind of psychosis or even neurosis. And I most definitely don’t see any signs of a chemically or even genetically induced dementia in Mrs. Jackson. Aside from a slight elevation in her blood pressure, she’s in excellent physical and psychological c
ondition.” Then, after he scanned the three faces of Aaron, then Ellen and then Junior, as if waiting for some aberrant reaction, he continued, “Of course the elevation in her blood pressure may be more directly related to the circumstances of her being here.”

  Aaron felt the judgment and looked to his sister to see if she felt it too, but found her with a look of sheer amazement on her face. His father and particularly his mother were stony with their immediate lack of expression. What was this? How had she done it? How had she managed to fool a nerdy little man with a medical degree from Yale into thinking that she was not confused in the most severest of clinical ways? After all, this was a man who clearly couldn’t have ever had a woman and therefore had nothing better to do in his life than hone his craft to an absolute perfection, so his judgment had to be sound. Aaron simply could not imagine what had gone wrong in the process. He lowered his head, because somewhere, something had to make sense.

  And just when the doctor said, “What I would suggest—”

  Aaron bounded from the chair, bumping it furiously against the wall and shouted, “No!”

  At first Dr. Lillywhite looked confusedly at Aaron, then his face grew arrogant. He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Jackson. I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I mean, no, this can’t be right. We come to you, asking you what we should do, asking you what needs to happen to get my mother to stop this whole thing about Clayton Cannon being Uncle Emeril’s son, and you tell us that there’s nothing we can do because she’s not crazy. Well, I’m telling you one damned thing for sure, you’re full of shit.”

  “Aaron!” his mother scolded.

  “No, now I’m sorry,” Aaron continued as he paced the floor. “Something has to be wrong with her, because if there’s not, then you’re telling me, Dr. Lillywhite, that I deserved to live in the shadow of this man who most of the time seems as mythical to me as he seems real. You’re telling me that I didn’t deserve to have a mother who gave me all of her attention without me having to go to bed at night wondering if I was the last little boy on her mind before she slept or if Clayton was. Is this what you’re telling me, Dr. Lillywhite?”