“No, honestly I don’t, Antonia. Because you said you deserve no less than the truth, and the truth is what I just gave to you.”
“I believe you gave me the truth, Junior. It’s just that you only gave me part of it. What’s the rest?”
“I don’t know what you want, Antonia. I swear I don’t.”
Antonia’s face slid down, down, down, until it was utterly formless. She crossed the room slowly. Past her daughter’s gaped mouth and stunned eyes, past her son’s face of sheer foreboding. And when she got to Junior, she moved as close to him as he would allow as he seemed to try to inch his way out the window. But she faced him with a look that seemed to tell of a most wretched betrayal, and she asked with an eerie quiet, “Junior, is that youngest boy of Cora’s your child? Is that whose picture is in that locket?”
The room was laden with their tension, and it was quiet enough in there to hear a mouse creeping across cotton. So Junior looked forlornly at some insignificant place just left of Antonia’s eyes and in a small voice confessed. “Yes.”
The only movement then was Aaron, who slumped back into his chair with the whump of a sack of something burdened with many things quite substantial. In that moment, right there having just learned what no one could have known, Aaron still couldn’t believe himself to be something other than his father’s only son. For him, this news was like a skittering bug that he wasn’t certain at all if he’d just seen, but whose presence made him quite nervous for the violation of its intrusion; and he wasn’t certain at all if he had just heard what was apparently quite real. He had always known that in some allegorical way, he was certainly not his mother’s only son. And so now, he wondered, how long would it take for him to reconfigure his mind, his heart to understand that things had never been as they’d seemed, but mostly he’d never been as he’d seemed.
The only thing that brought him out of himself in that moment was the look on his sister’s face, which he only now noticed after feeling the heat of her pleading stare. The eyes of a woman suddenly slapped broadside in the face with what he could only imagine was the infinite remembrance of Rick’s betrayal. And what made him feel her pain with a particular acuity was the overwhelming heft of being the only other one in the room, most definitely the only other one in her universe besides Rick, who knew and who shared the memory.
Then he thought he’d simply leave. Get up from there, go to work where a whole other distasteful matter of a broken heart awaited him, and put this entire episode aside for another day when it would make much more sense to him. Instead, he raised his head to find his mother just standing there before his father, locked in a gaze with eyes that weren’t looking back at her. So he got up, took his mother gently by her arm, and urged her back to her chair, saying, “Come on, Ma, you need to sit down.”
“No, I don’t,” she said, jerking away from her son. “I need him to explain to me how he could find comfort in the arms of a woman, and then father a child with a woman who pulls stink weed by the highway for voodoo rituals when he was married to me, the woman he vowed from the time he was sixteen years old that he’d love till a Dixieland band played his soul into heaven. That’s what you told me.”
“Come on, Antonia, you know I still love you in the biggest way like that. And besides, Cora doesn’t do that anymore. We were kids when she did that.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Antonia snapped. “We were kids when you told me how long you’d love me. And don’t you dare defend her!”
“Well, you brought it up,” Junior said, defending himself for defending Cora.
“I just need to know how it all started.”
Junior rubbed his head, and shifted awkwardly, looking at the floor. He was a man who seemed to be plagued with the frustration of trying to find words. “Antonia, I don’t know. I’m not sure I even remember.”
“Try.”
“I don’t know, I guess it started when I was down there after my father died and I was moving my mother out to Plaquemine. We got to talking, and I don’t know, I guess I discovered a part of Cora that I hadn’t paid attention to when we were kids. I was always so in love with you,” and he looked up at Antonia with truthful eyes.
But they met her ire, as she said, “And just what part of her did you discover, Junior?”
“Well, not that, Antonia. Please,” Junior said, seeming offended and discomfited all at once. He continued, “She’s kind. She’s very kind. And she listened to me when I reminisced about our childhood and my father and all. She watched me cry about the death of my father without a bit of judgment. I took it hard when I lost my father, Antonia. Did you know that?”
Antonia pressed her lips so hard they trembled, and there was no telling just what she might say. When she loosened her lips, she took a step back from Junior, as if to get a better look at him, and said, “Junior, how can you stand there and ask me that? Of course I knew how hard you took his death. And I thought you were talking to me, and only me about the most private parts of your grief. Now I learn that Cora was privy, too.”
“Antonia, it’s just that so much was going on then. My father died and at the same time you were getting more and more fired up about Clayton being Emeril’s son. Do you remember how, after the funeral, everybody went back to Momma’s house and nobody could find you? Two hours later you came strolling in there telling me how you went over to Agnes and Douglas Cannon’s house and saw Clayton playing in the front yard. ‘He’s Emeril’s son as sure as I’m Emeril’s twin.’ That’s what you said to me. I know you didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I didn’t want to hear that crap, Antonia. I had just buried by father, my hero, and you come in there telling me some nonsense like that. Ah shucks—” Junior waved his hand dismissively in the air, then moved past Antonia to walk toward the other side of the room. When he got there, he turned back toward her. “You know, I didn’t want to think about that anymore. I told myself years ago that it didn’t have any business going into the future with us, but here I am thirty-some years later talking about it.”
“Well, obviously Junior, this is something that’s been on your mind for all these years, and you needed to say it to me,” she said in a deflated voice. She went over to her chair and sat, where Ellen put her arms around her. Then she continued, “So I guess you’re telling me that it’s my fault you had the affair with Cora. I drove you into her arms, huh?”
“No!” Junior said adamantly. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m a man, and I’m a responsible man. I had a choice that night, and I knew that what I was doing was wrong, and I know that what I did was wrong. I’m just telling you how it happened. You wanted to know, so I told you.” Then he went and knelt in front of where Antonia sat. He took her hand softly from Ellen who’d held it and seemed not to want to let it go. But he had it nonetheless, and he held it as if it held his life. He regarded her earnestly, then continued, “Look, Antonia, you may believe this, or you may believe that I’m full of stuff, but I swear to you that I had no intention of carrying on an affair with Cora beyond that one night. But then when she came up pregnant, everything got real complicated real quick.”
Something needed to fill all the quiet that quickly flooded the room, so Dr. Lillywhite said, “I’m looking at you, Aaron, and you, Ellen, and I would imagine that this has got to seem pretty unbelievable to you. Would either of you like to tell your father your feelings about this?” And even though the question was for both, he was clearly looking at Aaron, whose emotions seemed to be more raw.
But instead of Aaron, it was Ellen who said, “Well, I know you cheated on Ma, Poppa, but I feel as if you cheated on me. I feel like you cheated on this whole family. I’m questioning everything. I’m even questioning if you’re on the board down there at Tulane’s medical school or if that’s just an excuse you use to get out of town and see your other family. And now that I know that we only had half of your attention too, I’m trying my best to see if your two halves made any kind of a whole for us, because you had me fooled, Pop
pa. You had me fooled into believing that you were giving us all of yourself.”
“And how does that make you feel, Ellen?” Dr. Lillywhite asked.
“How do you think it makes me feel?” she said acerbically. “It makes me feel like nothing about my life was as I thought it had been. At least with my mother, I knew who she was and what she was doing. I now realize that I never even knew this man.” And she pointed at her father with an indifferent, most impudent wave of her hand, as if shooing away something bothersome.
“And Aaron, what about you?” the doctor asked.
Aaron didn’t answer right away, because at first there didn’t seem to be anything to say that would change things. All of this—his mother’s distractedness, his father’s affair, his father’s bastard son—was set into motion long before he had been born and could have a say, on the day Clayton Cannon came into the world. Knowing he should say something, he simply offered, “I guess the way I see it is that if my mother had just listened to the first person who told her that Clayton Cannon was in no way Emeril’s son—who was most likely my father—we wouldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t think you were an ineffective quack, Dr. Lillywhite, no different than a con artist who got his degree from a storefront printer in Guadalajara for declaring that my mother’s a rational woman. And I wouldn’t be sitting here wishing my childhood away for a different kind of mother who would have made me the center of her world. But mostly, I know I wouldn’t be sitting here right now torn between anger and compassion for my father because of his indiscretion. That’s what I’m feeling.” And just when it seemed that he was done, he added one more thing that he knew some part of him should regret but didn’t. “Oh, and I wouldn’t be thinking from the coldest, blackest part of my heart that my father’s bastard son is just who he is—my father’s bastard son, and not a part of this family. He’s got a mother, and brothers, and sisters from that mother so he’s got his family. Not this one. My father’s a part of his family. That’s his choice. But I’m not his brother, not in any real way, and Ellen’s not his sister. So he’s nothing to me.”
That was all he said as he sat back in his chair. And as he waited for someone to say something, it immediately occurred to him that there was really nothing his mother or father could say in defense of the life they’d given him as a result of their choices. So he wondered what next. He wondered what would happen to him and his family on the other side of the door where their real life would be waiting to absorb all that had just happened. And just as he was about to question them on the very matter, he saw Ellen. It was the same Ellen from his kitchen just a few weeks ago, only this time her face was far more intensely gripped by something. Pain. This time agonizing. He went to get up and go to her when he heard her speak for herself.
“Okay, my water just broke,” was all she said.
CHAPTER
16
The restaurant seemed to be a living thing, Clayton thought, as he listened to the music’s voice that said more to him than the cacophony of human voices. He exercised the fingers of his right hand to the rhythm of the music, lifting each one only to bring it down on the table. And as if every finger had little minds and wills of their own, and as if he had a grand keyboard stretched out before him, he added the fingers of his left hand to the exercise. They moved across the table as if they were playing along with the music swirling around the room. He looked at his fingers and thought of the many years his fingers had been doing this as they went about their business of an evening workout, plucking out an inaudible tune. And yet here he is, he thought and lightly smiled to himself, as famous as a concert pianist can be and still working out those fingers whenever there was a chance to do so.
“This is quite a nice place,” Susan said.
Clayton looked at her with a kind yet apologetic smile, his lips only stretching sideways, showing no teeth, an expression, perhaps, trying to expunge the guilt of how long it had been since they had last been out as a man and woman—not as a mom and dad. So he put his hand on hers and gave it a loving squeeze. “It’s very nice,” he said. Then taking his hand slowly from hers, he continued, “I’m sorry, babe. We should do this more often. I should take you out more.”
Susan regarded him with curious eyes and spoke in a puzzled voice, “Clayton, you don’t hear me complaining. I love being at home in the evenings, helping the boys with their homework and spending quiet time with them as I read with them and tuck them in to sleep.” Susan stared off with a glint that nearly resembled wanderlust in her eyes and continued, “It’s the best in the world. Nothing would be better.” Then she looked at her husband and took back his hand whose fingers had already returned to their workout and said, “Nothing at all. I have no complaints about my life because I’m doing exactly what I dreamed of doing since the day I married you.”
Just then a couple ambled toward the booth and asked if anyone was sitting in the empty space. When Clayton invited them to sit, Susan merely nodded with a tense smile and slid smack up against Clayton—closer than she needed to be. Every move she made—from the awkward, jerky slide toward her husband to the strain in her countenance—spread her voluminous discomfort plainly enough for Clayton to see. He just prayed the couple couldn’t see, or even catch in the air, any part of her uneasiness.
So he said, “I’m Clayton Cannon and this is my wife Susan.” Clayton slid from the booth and stood, extending his hand first to the woman, then to the man. “Have a seat. Please.”
“Hello,” they said in perfect unison. “What a pleasure to meet you,” the woman said, taking Clayton’s hand and shaking it soundly.
“I’m James Woolsey,” the man said, “and this is my wife Sharon.”
As James and Sharon settled in, a man in a blue suit—the kind of blue with just enough green in it to make it a questionable blue, depending on the light—swaggered up to the stage, which brought the jazz band to a fading silence. He took a microphone from a stand in the middle of the stage with the confidence of a man who ruled some sort of roost. He commanded the crowd’s attention without so much as asking. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Graham Stevens, and I want to thank you all for coming tonight,” he said. Once a thin round of applause died down, he continued, “And I’d like to acknowledge a very special guest of mine, a good friend who supported my dream of opening this place. Clayton Cannon.” Graham looked over at Clayton who only smiled modestly. Then Graham continued, “Clayton has been a great friend since our days at Peabody. I don’t need to tell you what he studied.” He gave way to a wave of laughter, then said, “I was studying the violin, and I guess I also don’t have to tell you whose music career took off.”
The room, again, filled with laughter, but Clayton yelled loudly over the guffawing crowd, “Your career just took a different turn, Graham.”
“Now, that’s a true friend for you,” Graham said. “This man has just found a way to justify my parents’ paying out four years of tuition at a conservatory of music for a concert violinist’s career that never happened,” he said, bringing the crowd to a scattering chuckle. He smoothed his deep black hair that somehow made quite a striking contrast against his skin that seemed far too pale in its whiteness to have ever seen the sun. Then he continued, “Seriously, though, folks, I want to thank you all for coming here tonight and I want you to savor our food, drink our wine, enjoy our music, and think of this place as your place.” And with that, he swaggered coolly from the stage, surrounded by a healthy applause.
Clayton, with a lingering smile left over from his tribute, sipped the wine that had just been set in front of him, Susan, James and Sharon without anyone at the table having to ask. It was without any doubt his favorite merlot because, as he fondly remembered, Graham always paid special attention to and never forgot, the likes and dislikes of his friends. As he set his wine on the table, he noticed several friendly smiles and waves from various parts of the room. Maybe there was someone in those grinning faces he knew, but right then, it was all h
e could do simply to smile and wave back. It made him feel like disingenuous royalty. And much like he assumed disingenuous royalty must feel each time they set foot into the world, he simply wanted the smiling and waving to end.
“This is very good wine,” Sharon said. “And I can’t believe he gave James and me a complimentary glass, too.”
“Yeah, well this wine is my favorite,” Clayton told her. “That’s just the way Graham is, always looking out for friends—and the friends of his friends. He’s true blue that way.”
James set his glass of wine down and looked at Clayton and said, “So how serendipitous is it that we’d end up sitting at the same table as Baltimore’s most recent claim to fame. You’re like the rock star of the classical music world down here.”
Clayton lowered his head with a chuckle of humility, then looked at James. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. But it feels a little surreal, if you want to know the truth. All these people smiling and waving at me. As far as this city goes, I’m completely claimed by the people of Baltimore, and I’m not altogether certain I know why.” He took another sip of his wine before continuing, “I appreciate it, though. I appreciate it very much.”
After that, the table fell silent, focusing on the jazz band that had struck up again. The saxophone in this languorous piece of music wailed in a shade of blue that Clayton immediately understood. He felt comforted in a way he wished would never end; and it showed in his far-off gaze and wistful smile that only slightly tweaked the corners of his mouth. It seemed as if he would never come back from the place this instrument took him.
But James brought him back when he said, “So you lived here before, when you were studying at the Peabody?”
Clayton, who willed himself to be present at the table again, answered, “Yeah. Four years I spent here.”
“Do you like it here?” James asked.
Clayton thought for a few seconds about the question as his narrowed eyes folded into an ironic smile, then replied, “Baltimore makes me wonder half the time why I live here and then at other times makes me glad I do.” Then he shook his finger in midair like a sage, pointing at no one in particular and said, “All I can really say is that there’s something in this town that keeps pulling me back here. But on top of that, it’s a nice town. Colorful in its own way, but hardly able to compete with, say, all of New Orleans’s colors.”
The Color of Family Page 31
