by Earl Emerson
Because until the time I was four I’d lived in poverty with my grandmother, and because I’d been the only black kid around the Carmichaels and thus automatically experienced their cushy world somewhat differently, I had a different take on things than my siblings. Yet for the most part I adapted readily enough to their patterns of ease, overconsumption, and entitlement.
Being a Carmichael was knowing you would never want for the best table at the trendiest restaurant, that any travel you could dream up was as close as a phone call to the family travel agent, that a job paying obscene amounts of money was waiting for you after graduation no matter what your grades or how many young women you’d knocked up—Shelby Junior had knocked up two that I knew of. It meant having a family chef. It meant having ski instructors who were former Swiss National Ski Team members. Spending three weeks every August in the San Juans on an island your family once owned pretty much in its entirety.
A kindhearted woman in the main, my adoptive mother felt compelled to ever so gently point out the differences between Carmichaels and middle-class America. Her attitude left a lasting impression I did not quickly shed after rejoining the rest of society. African-American culture was never talked about in the Carmichael household, but I’d had clues, lots of them, from their pronouncements on white culture. According to Helen Carmichael, the common man was to be pitied for his obsessions with cheap baubles, sex, expensive toys he couldn’t afford, drugs, big ugly four-wheel-drive trucks, and obscenely large television sets that dominated tastelessly decorated houses. It didn’t occur to me until years later that deep down she was afraid I would eventually return to my poverty-stricken roots and embarrass the family, which of course in her mind is exactly what happened in the end.
My mother would have been the first to deny she was an elitist, but she made it abundantly clear what the attitude of a Carmichael should be. We were separate. We were better. We were special. The rest of the world was playing catch-up but never could or would equal our elite prestige.
Of course, having been adopted, I had to dismiss a fair portion of reality in order to buy into this worldview, but nevertheless, until I was fourteen, buy into it I did. After that, I decided the advantages of being a Carmichael outweighed the sin of snobbery, and when I did have qualms, I let Kendra voice them instead of stepping up to the plate myself. Kendra fought my mother tooth and nail—never a mother and daughter who fought more than those two—from before I entered the family when Kendra was three until the day I left when she was sixteen.
I knew that after a few years of dips the Carmichael clan had increased its wealth substantially since I was booted out, that before entering politics with the promise to be the voice of the common man, Stone had worked first as a corporate lawyer and then as a CEO for a series of family-controlled companies. And that, had I remained in the family, I would have worked there, too, regarding a captain’s pay in the fire department as pocket change. No true Carmichael would ever have considered a career in the fire service. Only peasants risked their lives for monetary gain. A Carmichael male might expose himself to danger, but he would do it climbing a mountain for charity, racing a car that cost as much as your average house, flying a private jet, or pursuing any number of the other activities peculiar to people wealthy enough to burn cash for heat.
What made my renewed proximity to all this money and exclusivity frightening was the fact that I knew I could once again adapt to it in a heartbeat, and the recognition of that weakness made me almost physically ill.
If I sucked up to the family in the appropriate fashion, there was a chance I could be forgiven and accepted back into the fold. I could have an income of six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars a year, plus substantial bonuses, instead of my puny captain’s pay, settling back into the fold that had ejected me like a hacking, humped-up dog getting rid of a chicken bone in its throat. But then, there was revenge in my soul, too—I could feel it heating my brain like a fever—and a Mercedes-Benz full of money wasn’t going to quench that primal need for blood. Stone knew me well enough to realize what I was feeling, and it was part and parcel of why he was kissing my butt tonight. He and I both knew if they took me back in, sooner or later I’d fling a goober into their collective faces. Or a brick. Or a report on the Z Club fire that would be disastrous for his city administration. I knew him well enough to know he was afraid of me.
I knew Stone might be here and that it was almost a certainty his wife, who was one of the organizers, would be here, but the thought of running into Kendra simply hadn’t occurred to me. I was glad to see her but was also watchful and leery, trying to deduce what she was thinking. Since she hadn’t reached out to contact me in nineteen years, I had to believe she thought I was guilty of the crimes of which I’d been accused. But once we began talking, she was the same little sister I’d fought to protect in school, the same unaffected soul with the same teary blue eyes that I’d last seen weeping on the family island all those years ago, sweet, sensitive, and a bit ingenuous.
And then we met the looming, bombastic authority figure of my youth, the master of resolve, our father, who had grown jowls since I last saw him, and who was pontificating to a group of men using all the bluff and bluster that had been his stock-in-trade. I’d thought about this moment for almost twenty years, but the emotion I’d counted on was not the emotion that overwhelmed me as we came face-to-face.
Here was the father who’d drummed me out of the family with the finality of a hanging judge, but instead of a hateful man he was the saddest human I’d seen in a long while, a man who in his life had seldom tried to do right simply for the sake of doing right, and who, when he finally lifted his hand in charity by adopting me, found everything unraveling in one ugly episode. I’d always dreamed of a dramatic showdown where I came out triumphant and vindicated, where I somehow not only gained a consummate revenge for the evil visited on me but was also welcomed back into the family in a manner that made twenty years of exile almost worthwhile. But in the end we made small talk and I left.
I caught a glimpse of India, who, in the brief moments I saw her, appeared to be even more beautiful than the scattered photos I’d seen of her over the years. Moments after she disappeared, my gut was filled with yearning. But then, that had always been India’s magic over the male species and her transcendence over the female: Her ability to make men ache for her.
As we worked our way through the party, trying to meet, greet, and then sideslip the African-American community leaders who wanted to give us advice, pump us for information, or lecture us on what they thought was wrong with the fire department and the city, I couldn’t keep my thoughts from wandering back to India. I recalled how on that last horrible night everybody had congregated in the living room in the big house, and how they wouldn’t let me see Echo. Though the room had been full of people who knew me well and supposedly, until that night, loved me, nobody had taken up the cudgel in my behalf: Neither of my adoptive parents, nor India, nor even my little sister, Kendra. The worst part came when I tried to stand up for myself.
As I thought about that night, I had an epiphany of the sort that doesn’t seem possible because it’s so late in coming and yet so painfully obvious. I realized with a shock that since leaving the Carmichael family I’d had relationships with African-American women, Hispanic women, Asians, and a Native American woman I nearly asked to marry me, but never anybody white. Now as I mulled it over, it was so obvious as to why that was the case, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t hit me before.
When I approached India, she stiffened momentarily, then quickly recovered her trademark composure, stepping forward to kiss the air next to my cheek as if we were casual acquaintances from the tennis club. “Trey. It’s been a while.”
“Yes, it has.”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to see you again.”
“Don’t worry. I have a ticket and a date and everything. I’ve already spoken to Kendra and Father and Stone, and so far nobody’s called
the police. Although I think they might be poisoning a batch of Gruyère cheese puffs in the back room.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No, I guess you probably didn’t.”
We conversed warily about everything but what was uppermost in my mind and probably in hers, too, and then when the interruptions became too frequent, we retreated to the small herb garden outside the patio doors on the first floor. It was there in that warren of relative privacy that her demeanor softened, and I began to get the feeling she had no more forgotten the best parts of that last summer than I had.
“I guess I should warn you. Echo’s somewhere on the premises with her husband. John’s a little unpredictable.”
“I was hoping you would be here. I wanted to see you again. But I wasn’t looking forward to running into her.”
“No, I wouldn’t think you would be.”
“She lied about me. You know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Does she ever talk about it?”
“Never.”
“How is she?”
“They’re getting by. They’ve got two boys, same as Stone and me. It’s a challenge with John, and she’s completely absorbed in her music. She always has been. I think she’ll be okay seeing you, Trey. It was a long time ago.”
“The question is, will I be okay seeing her.”
“What is that look? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m just wondering why you didn’t stand up for me that night. I’ve been wondering for nineteen years, and now I’m standing here talking with you, I can’t help myself. Why didn’t you tell your father where we’d been?”
“I wasn’t your alibi, Trey. I couldn’t account for the time when it happened. I couldn’t get you out of it.”
“You mean all you could do was embarrass yourself if you tried to defend me.”
“Yes.”
“You must have known I couldn’t possibly have done what they said.”
“It was between you and my little sister, and I had to take her word over yours. Besides, you don’t want to drag all that up. Not here. Let’s talk about pleasant things. How’s your job going?”
“Sure. That’s pleasant. Let’s see. Four weeks ago I was at a fire where fourteen people burned to death. I got burned myself, and now I’m being asked to investigate the conduct of the fire department at the fire in an effort to stop the longest series of marches and rioting this city’s seen in decades. I just tonight insulted the woman I work with, so she probably won’t be speaking to me next week, and now because of my job I’m running into the five or six people in my life I never wanted to see again and who never wanted to see me again, and we’re all pretending it’s hunky-dory. Work is going fine.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way about me.”
“I didn’t mean you. I’ve thought about you a lot over the years. And forgive my sarcastic answer to your question. I’m bad that way.”
“You were sarcastic as a kid, too.”
“It happens to be a family trait. My real mother has it. So how are you doing?”
“How am I doing? I have two kids I love to death and a husband who works too hard and wants to be president of the United States. Honestly. President of the United States.”
* * *
India’s sister, Echo, didn’t take my unexpected reintroduction with the same equanimity India had—which because of our history, I expected. But then, she’d never been in the same league with her older sister when it came to public appearances or glossing over the disagreeable aspects of life. Echo more or less stuttered, “Trey? Is that you?” then began going on and on about some avant-garde music project she was involved in. Oddly enough, India had evolved into a more mature version of her eighteen-year-old self, while Echo had journeyed out of her teens in the opposite direction, her hair dyed black and cut in irregular notches, her ears and other visible soft tissue filled with metal studs, her arms and the side of her neck peppered with tattoos. She was more gangly than she had been as a teen, walking across the room after we spoke as if she had a rock in her shoe.
22. JUST LIKE OLD TIMES UNDER THE LYNCHING BRIDGE
TREY>
It was shortly after midnight, and most of the guests had gone home. I should have had the good sense to leave, too, but Kendra was clinging to me as if she was afraid I would disappear for another nineteen years, and I didn’t have the heart to depart. In the sitting room where I’d first encountered my father, we were gathered together: the Carmichaels, assorted spouses, Jamie Estevez, and me. Behind Shelby Carmichael stood his nurse, a woman named Lonnie, whose skin was the color of black coffee and who dutifully remained part of the wallpaper. It occurred to me that the old man had never been without black help, always a driver or cook or gardener, the darker the better.
Echo was there with her husband, John Armstrong. Stone and India Carmichael were beside the old man at the head of the table. Kendra, tentative and leery of the new family dynamic, stood next to me with her husband, Cal, a stocky man who had a genial air about him.
“I guess we all know why we’re here,” my father said. “The shindig tonight was a success financially. Raised what? India?”
“Something over half a million.”
There was some polite clapping, and then he said, “And of course Trey is back. As it happens, he’s a captain in the fire department right here in town. He’s working on the minority community’s report on the Z Club fire.”
“I for one am so glad to see him,” said Kendra.
“That’s right,” said Stone. “People make mistakes. They turn their lives around. And the past is the past.” Echo, who was staring at her shoes, displayed no emotion one way or the other.
Before anybody else could break the silence, John Armstrong stepped forward and said, “Are you people all demented?”
“Please, John—” Kendra began.
“You’re all pretending as if this son of a bitch didn’t rape my wife when she was fifteen. You’re all pretending she didn’t lose her virginity to this black bastard.” The room lapsed into a stunned silence, like the quiet after a cannon burst, and it was apparent that nobody had any idea what to say, including me. I thought the best thing would be to turn around and leave the room, take Estevez home, and try to forget the evening, but when I made a move to leave, Kendra grasped my arm and held me in place. She was not going to let go. In a sense, I had to applaud her for that.
Finally Kendra looked at Armstrong and said, “Pipe down, John. There’s no call for that kind of talk.”
“I’m not going to pipe down. This bastard raped my wife. He shouldn’t be here. He should be in prison.”
“I think—”
“Rapist motherfucker!” Armstrong said, standing directly in front of me and staring into my eyes.
“All I can say is I didn’t do it.”
“Now you’re calling my wife a liar?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Bullshit. You’re the liar.” From the front of the mansion we could hear the string ensemble putting away their instruments and murmuring among themselves. “I don’t believe you people,” Armstrong said, moving around the circle. A heavy man an inch or two shorter than me, he had a bulky chest, ruddy cheeks, and thick-knuckled hands. He looked as if he could take care of himself. Earlier in the evening India told me he was a painting supervisor for one of his father-in-law’s construction companies. “Have you people forgotten your own family history?”
“You weren’t even there,” my father said, “so how would you know?”
“I know Echo hasn’t been able to sleep for twenty years. I know she needs to see a therapist twice a week.”
“Quiet, John,” Echo said.
“I won’t be quiet. This man ruined your life, and they’re all acting as if it never happened.”
“They’re just trying to get through the evening like reasonable human beings,” Echo said. “Let it go.”
&
nbsp; “It’s not like there was a trial or anything,” said Kendra, straining to say something that made sense of this conflict.
“A trial? Screw the trial. You had enough proof to banish him from the family for nineteen years. Enough for a half-million-dollar settlement between the Carmichael and Overby families. There was enough proof that none of you people has seen him since it happened. And now you welcome him back as if he’s been on a two-week cultural exchange to Canada? Get him out of here. Get him the hell out of here.”
Armstrong was as angry as I’d ever seen anyone, and when he stopped in front of me, I knew he wasn’t nearly as drunk as he pretended. “You goddamn bastard,” he said, fists clenched at his sides, the blood vessels in his thick neck and along one eye bulging. I noted his tie as a possible point of leverage, even as I unknotted mine. Kendra let go of my arm and stepped forward, but Armstrong brushed her off roughly. On the other side of me, Cal, Kendra’s husband, knocked over a lamp in his rush to put distance between himself and the possibility of a physical confrontation.
“You’re right,” I said. “I am a bastard. A circumstance of birth over which I had no control.” I tossed a look at the old man. “And I may be damned, too, but I never touched your wife.”
“Liar! She’ll never be the person she could have been, and it’s all your fault.”
“I am the person I could have been,” Echo said weakly, although I’m not sure her husband heard.
“That was all a long time ago,” said Shelby, standing shakily. Lonnie, the nurse, stepped forward and took the old man’s arm to keep him from toppling, holding it against her ample bosom.
“What you need is to get your black ass out of here,” Armstrong said at the same time that he took a wide, looping swing at me. He was powerful enough to hurt me if he connected, but he was just a little bit drunk and a whole lot pissed, and it took the edge off any skill he had. He threw two more quick punches and stepped into me, trying for my gut. I dodged the first blows and stepped inside the last. Neither Cal nor Stone, the only other able-bodied men in the room, made any effort to stop it.
