Then James said, with just a hint of embarrassment in his chuckle, “You know, I grew up here in Baltimore and I’m ashamed to admit that until all this buzz over you moving here, I didn’t know that Peabody gave out a college degree. I thought it was just a place where rich parents sent their kids to take lessons.”
“Actually, at these conservatories of music, they have auditions that sort out the ones who have the talent from the ones who don’t. I mean, you can’t just skate into a conservatory on marginal talent only to end up getting a degree that means you can teach music lessons from your parlor or at any elementary school in the country. And to me, if you don’t have what it takes to be a concert musician, then I say, What’s the point?” Clayton ran his finger around the rim of his glass, picking apart in his mind every sentiment behind what he’d just said. Then he looked apologetically at James, and then Sharon and said, “I guess what I just said makes me sound like an overblown snob, huh?”
Susan shook her head firmly from side to side in a definite no. It was as if she was about to say something, then she just settled herself back in for the rest of the discussion.
That’s when Sharon said, “No, not at all. I agree that there are certain God-given talents and no one is ever going to teach someone into a talent.”
“I think that is, for the most part, true,” Clayton said, after which he swallowed the last bit of wine in his glass. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that, number one, in my field, I don’t see the point in learning how to play the music if you’re not going to share it. Interpret it for the world. And number two, I’m saying that I could no more be a brain surgeon than a brain surgeon could do what I do, because I don’t have the passion to be one and I would think a brain surgeon wouldn’t have the passion to be a concert anything.”
Sharon then replied, jocularly, “Well, maybe he could do what you do, but he just wouldn’t do it as well.”
And from that, they all shared a hearty laugh until Clayton added, “So, James, what kind of work do you do?”
“Well, I work not far from here. I’m a metallurgist at Bethlehem Steel,” James said before he swallowed the last of his wine.
“Now, you see there!” Clayton said in a tone that was about to wrap his point up in a package that would not need reopening. “I know all of the metals, but if you sat me down behind his desk they’d fire me in ten minutes.”
“Well, I listen to music, but they wouldn’t let me on the stage at the Meyerhoff.” Once again, the table erupted in the bit of hilarity James had just given them.
But Susan, who barely laughed, and just gave up the stingiest of smiles said, “It really is all about passion, you know.” Then she sat back and waited for a reaction, as if to dare them to continue to leave her out of the conversation.
Clayton put his hand on her shoulder and slid it gently to the back of her neck to apologize for what he knew he, James, and Sharon had obviously done. It was situations like this, he knew, where she felt small as a mother and wife with all the other careers at the table. Really, he couldn’t know for sure, but Sharon certainly seemed to have the savvy and curiosity of a woman with a career. Clayton didn’t even have to hear Susan say it to know that she felt that those careers, his, James’s, and Sharon’s (whatever hers was), mocked in no other way aside from the fact that they took place away from home. So Clayton said to Susan, even though he’d said it himself just moments before, “You’re absolutely right about that. It is all about passion. Everyone should have a passion for what they do.”
At that point, James seemed to be pulled from the conversation with the distraction of whatever it was that had gripped him and spread clean across his face. James pulled out a key chain from his pocket that couldn’t possibly take another key. Then he complained to Clayton, “These things always dig into my leg.”
Sharon looked at the keys, raised one eyebrow, and twisted her mouth to one side, then said, “I hope you’re not waiting for me to feel sorry for you. Every time this happens I offer to put the keys in my purse, and you say, ‘No, I’ll just keep them here on the table.’”
Clayton and Sharon, and even James, got a good tickle at the imitation Sharon did of James. Then, when Clayton looked closely at the key chain and saw M.I.T. emblazoned across the round disk, he asked, “M.I.T, is that your alma mater?”
“Yep, it is, as a matter of fact,” James answered.
“Did you and Sharon meet there?” Clayton wanted to know.
“Well, in a way we did,” James said.
And Sharon picked up the story from there. “James was doing a semester down at Georgia Tech and I was in college down there in Georgia.”
“Really!” Susan said with an astonishment that was, at the least, odd. “You went to Georgia Tech?”
“Oh no,” Sharon said, somewhat contritely. “I’m sorry, I should have made that clearer. I was at Spelman College down in Atlanta.” Then she asked Susan, “And what about you? Where did you go to school?”
Susan sat up a little taller and smoothed a piece of hair behind her right ear, then answered in a high-born tone that came straight from the South, “Well, I attended a liberal arts catholic university over in D.C. called Georgetown University.”
Sharon reared her head back, as if to take Susan from a distance, as if to see if she were at all real. Then she looked at Clayton, who seemed to be apologizing with his eyes while holding his breath for something to come. All she could say with just enough sarcasm was, “Well yes. I’ve heard of Georgetown. I’m a journalist. We kind of have to know little things like that.”
Clayton desperately tried to think of what to throw over the situation to alleviate it, so he said, “So you’re a journalist. You guys are the darker side of what I do. I hope you’re not going to whip out a microphone and notepad on me tonight.”
Sharon laughed tightly, as if most of her encounter with Susan had not even begun to fade, then said, “No, of course not. But I did get this invitation to come here tonight because I’m a reporter at the Sun.”
“Well, I just did an interview earlier today with some guy over at Baltimore magazine,” Clayton said as he nodded to the waiter who had just brought the table another round of wine. “He found it odd, or at least surprising—I don’t know which—to hear me say that I do listen to other kinds of music other than the music of the serious dead guys I play. That would be like someone being surprised at you, James, for building a house out of brick instead of steel, or some other sort of metal.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be like that,” James said. “Except that I think people assume that a concert pianist wouldn’t find value in anything outside of that classical world. I mean, sometimes I wonder just how many true musicians there are out there, and not just dilettantes like rappers who call themselves musicians or Kenny G and whatever it is he’s supposed to be playing.”
“There is a lot of junk out here, that’s for sure, but there are some really true, talented musicians playing some good stuff, too. And believe it or not, there are a lot of musicians out here who aren’t giving way to the crap that becomes part of pop culture and those guys are really suffering, let me tell you.”
“That’s right,” James said, nodding his head in agreement.
A lull fell over the table’s conversation. More people had packed into the place since the last time Clayton had paid attention. He looked around the room, smiling at all who smiled, and waving at those who waved—mostly old classmates who were more numerous than he ever thought he’d run into in one place again. This was a virtual reunion, he thought. The only thing missing were the name tags, which he desperately needed. Graham sure kept in touch with everybody, he thought. Then he made eye contact with one woman who smiled, and it was so clear that she was on her way over as soon as she could get herself out of the conversation. A name, Nancy, crawled into his mind from somewhere and attached itself to her image, but just that quickly, doubt slid up beside it with the name Marcy. So, as she finally approached, he ju
st decided to let things happen.
“Clayton!” the woman said as her lips were starting their descent for a landing smack on his cheek.
“How are you?” Clayton said as the woman got her peck over with. He glanced only briefly at Susan, realizing that if he didn’t remember the woman, certainly she wouldn’t.
Then Susan said, as her arm slid past Clayton to take the woman’s hand, “Nancy, how are you, honey? God it’s been so long.”
“I’m just great, Susan. It’s so good to see you.”
Clayton looked as perplexed as any man would look who didn’t, in the most perfect of worlds, expect his wife to know what he didn’t in this particular situation. “You two remember each other?”
“Of course,” Susan said. “Don’t you remember the summer you and I, and Nancy and her boyfriend Don, who was in one of your classes, worked up on Block Island? Nancy and I were waitresses and you and Don were bus boys at that restaurant.”
Clayton threw up his hands, remembering that summer, then said, “Of course I remember that now. How could I have forgotten? We had a great time up there that summer.”
“We sure did,” Nancy said. Then she looked at Susan and replied, “That boyfriend Don became my husband Don.”
And before Susan would let her get anything else out, she exclaimed, “Oh, my! Isn’t that nice?”
“Well yeah, except now he’s my ex-husband Don.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Susan said, with just a little more pink in her cheeks than usual.
“It was for the best,” Nancy said. “Anyway, I just wanted to come over and say hello, and to say welcome back to Baltimore. And Clayton, it’s so good to see you after all this time. You’re still the same unassuming guy I remember from Peabody.” She dug into her pocketbook and pulled out a card and handed it to Susan, then said, “Y’all give me a call sometime. We could meet for lunch or something.”
“That would be great,” Susan said. “You take care, now, honey.”
“Yeah, I’ll see you” was all Clayton said.
When Clayton turned his attention back to the table, Sharon and James were talking, and rather intimately, it seemed. So he looked away as if he didn’t at all notice their private moment.
So Sharon said, “You know, I was just telling James to look at the backs of all the chairs. They’re shaped like eighth notes.”
Like the others, Clayton turned his attention to the backs of the chairs and said, “What do you know? They sure are. I didn’t even notice that.”
Then, turning to Sharon, Susan replied, “Oh, how clever of you! How do you know what eighth notes look like? I mean, the chair backs have such a subtle resemblance, how on earth did you make the connection?”
Whatever semblance of frivolity that had been in Sharon’s demeanor in the mere seconds before seemed to be wiped off immediately with the rough rag of Susan’s implication. Sharon drew in a breath so deep it seemed like something to be feared, then said, “Well, it seems like the backs of the chairs aren’t all that’s subtle here tonight. But just so you know how I know what eighth notes look like—and this may come as quite a shock to you—but I took cello lessons for five years. Do you want to know what made a little black girl, from some slum in your imagination, ever find her way to the cello?” And when there was nothing but a gape-mouthed gaze coming from Susan, Sharon quietly said, “I guess not.”
And when Sharon gathered up her purse and motioned to James that she wanted to leave, Clayton spoke up, “No, please don’t. You two stay and enjoy your evening. We’re leaving.” When he stood and stepped back to give Susan enough room to get up, he encountered the same slack-jawed amazement that Sharon had just seen. So, not necessarily in the warmest of tones, he said, “Come on, let’s go.”
CHAPTER
17
A determined rain tapped at the window as if it would beat its way through the glass. Ellen lay in her hospital bed watching her merely hours-old boy sleep in the bassinette in a way only babies know how—peacefully and completely oblivious to the messy world into which they’re born. But for better or worse, she thought, here he is, shielded by the very nature of being a baby from everything that plagues his mother’s mind. Or could babies feel tension through the same sixth sense that makes adults know when stress or even danger is all around them? she wondered. There was no amount of sleep for her, she knew, that could take away everything that sat with all its heft in the middle of her mind.
She heard the click of heels out in the hall, and somehow she knew—maybe through that same sixth sense—that those heels were clicking their way to her door and into her room.
Antonia rounded the corner, saying to Ellen, “Hello, my baby.” And as she bent to give Ellen a mother’s hug and kiss, Antonia pulled a chair over next to the bassinette and stared at her grandchild with wonder. “My baby’s first baby. This is a miracle. It’s something every woman prays she’ll get to see one day.”
Ellen looked at the yellow suit, then into her mother’s face with squinty eyes that had never seen her mother wear the same thing two days in a row. So she questioned, “Ma, did you spend the night here at the hospital?”
“Of course I did. This is my first grandchild. I wasn’t about to leave you or this baby. One of the nurses let me sleep in the room right next door because they had plenty of rooms available. I guess this is a slow time for having babies.”
“So where’s Poppa?” Ellen asked, even though there was something in the air that told her that her father was nowhere nearby.
“Oh, I sent him on his way home. It was two o’clock this morning before this baby decided he wanted to come out. Aaron left around eleven last night. In fact, I need to call him to tell him about his nephew.”
“So have you talked to Poppa about yesterday at the doctor’s office?” Ellen knew she had staggered into icy, itchy territory when her mother simply didn’t answer. Ellen thought of asking again, but then she figured that it didn’t make much sense to single-handedly guide the conversation down a road that would bring her mother’s anger and hurt into the room where innocence slept.
Antonia picked up the baby, gazed into his sleeping face and said, “Look at this family this child has come into. Everything’s a mess.”
“Which mess are you talking about?” Ellen said in a flat and low tone.
“All of it. You all thinking I’m crazy and all.” She stood rocking from side to side, cradling the baby in her arms, then looked guardedly at Ellen and continued, “But mostly this whole thing with your father and that Cora is what has thrown this family into such a mess.”
So Ellen sat up in her bed and asked her mother to sit, and when she did, Ellen said, “Ma, I know it was a shock for you to find this out after all these years, especially knowing that the woman he had the affair with was your friend. But, Ma, I really think it’s just like Poppa said. I think it was a situation where she was simply meant to be a temporary distraction and then things took a turn for the worst, in terms of you and Poppa, when she got pregnant.” She slouched and put her back against the bed before saying, “I do think what he did was an abomination against the entire family, but I think it’s forgivable.”
“You think cheating is forgivable?” Antonia asked in outrage.
“I think that in most circumstances cheating—that is when you’re not talking about a serial cheater—happens because that person needs something from the relationship and either goes looking for it, or waits for fate to drop the temptation into his lap. This Cora woman was a temptation of fate. Poppa wouldn’t have gone looking for a woman who had three children, each with a different father. He has more class than that. I think this woman was just in the right place at a time when a weakened man was in that place too.”
Antonia put the baby back in the bassinette and sat. She stared off at nothingness, as if she were actually seeing Ellen’s words. Then, with an acerbic tone that seemed to be meant for Junior and not for Ellen, she glared at her daughter and replied, “Well, what I�
��m telling you is that he should have resisted the temptation. He just should have been a strong enough man to say that he had a wife at home who could take care of him. That he had a family he loved. That should have taken precedence over temptation.”
Ellen watched her son as he moved his mouth into a tiny pucker and back, she said, “Could have taken care of him, Ma, or would have. There’s a difference, a world of difference between the two.”
“I’m certain, Ellen, that I don’t know what you mean,” Antonia said defensively.
“What I mean, Ma, is of course you could take care of him. What I’m saying is that you wouldn’t because there was something possessing your every thought, almost, over which it seemed no one, not even Poppa and his needs as your husband, could ever take precedence.”
Antonia clenched her pocketbook to her chest and slid to the edge of her seat, drawing herself in so that it looked as if she would get up and leave right then and there rather than listen to another word of Ellen’s. Then, as her head fell to one shoulder and her face wore a puzzled look, she said, “So you’re taking your father’s side? I can’t believe that as a woman, as my daughter, you would take his side.”
“Ma, that’s just the thing. I’m taking both of your sides. Yes, what Poppa did was wrong. But does it make it worth throwing away more than forty-five years of a relationship, first as friends, then as husband and wife?” Ellen paused for the scarcest moment, as if she wanted her mother to answer, but instead continued, “I don’t think Cora, or this son of hers and Daddy’s, is worth throwing all these years away. You can forgive Poppa. You can.”
The Color of Family Page 32
