The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

by Nella Larsen

  “Damn!”

  Irene hung up the receiver with an emphatic bang, her thoughts immediately filled with self-reproach. She’d done it again. Allowed Clare Kendry to persuade her into promising to do something for which she had neither time nor any special desire. What was it about Clare’s voice that was so appealing, so very seductive?

  Clare met her in the hall with a kiss. She said: “You’re good to come, ’Rene. But, then, you always were nice to me.” And under her potent smile a part of Irene’s annoyance with herself fled. She was even a little glad that she had come.

  Clare led the way, stepping lightly, towards a room whose door was standing partly open, saying: “There’s a surprise. It’s a real party. See.”

  Entering, Irene found herself in a sitting room, large and high, at whose windows hung startling blue draperies which triumphantly dragged attention from the gloomy chocolate-colored furniture. And Clare was wearing a thin floating dress of the same shade of blue, which suited her and the rather difficult room to perfection.

  For a minute Irene thought the room was empty, but turning her head, she discovered, sunk deep in the cushions of a huge sofa, a woman staring up at her with such intense concentration that her eyelids were drawn as though the strain of that upward glance had paralyzed them. At first Irene took her to be a stranger, but in the next instant she said in an unsympathetic, almost harsh voice: “And how are you, Gertrude?”

  The woman nodded and forced a smile to her pouting lips. “I’m all right,” she replied. “And you’re just the same, Irene. Not changed a bit.”

  “Thank you,” Irene responded as she chose a seat. She was thinking: “Great goodness! Two of them.”

  For Gertrude too had married a white man, though it couldn’t be truthfully said that she was “passing.” Her husband—what was his name?—had been in school with her and had been quite well aware, as had his family and most of his friends, that she was a Negro. It hadn’t, Irene knew, seemed to matter to him then. Did it now, she wondered. Had Fred—Fred Martin, that was it—had he ever regretted his marriage because of Gertrude’s race? Had Gertrude?

  Turning to Gertrude, Irene asked: “And Fred, how is he? It’s unmentionable years since I’ve seen him.”

  “Oh, he’s all right,” Gertrude answered briefly.

  For a full minute no one spoke. Finally out of the oppressive little silence Clare’s voice came pleasantly, conversationally: “We’ll have tea right away. I know that you can’t stay long, ’Rene. And I’m so sorry you won’t see Margery. We went up the lake over the weekend to see some of Jack’s people, just out of Milwaukee. Margery wanted to stay with the children. It seemed a shame not to let her, especially since it’s so hot in town. But I’m expecting Jack any second.”

  Irene said briefly: “That’s nice.”

  Gertrude remained silent. She was, it was plain, a little ill at ease. And her presence there annoyed Irene, roused in her a defensive and resentful feeling for which she had at the moment no explanation. But it did seem to her odd that the woman that Clare was now should have invited the woman that Gertrude was. Still, of course, Clare couldn’t have known. Twelve years since they had met.

  Later, when she examined her feeling of annoyance, Irene admitted, a shade reluctantly, that it arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well.

  Clare spoke again, this time at length. Her talk was of the change that Chicago presented to her after her long absence in European cities. Yes, she said in reply to some question from Gertrude, she’d been back to America a time or two, but only as far as New York and Philadelphia, and once she had spent a few days in Washington. John Bellew, who, it appeared, was some sort of international banking agent, hadn’t particularly wanted her to come with him on this trip, but as soon as she had learned that it would probably take him as far as Chicago, she made up her mind to come anyway.

  “I simply had to. And after I once got here, I was determined to see someone I knew and find out what had happened to everybody. I didn’t quite see how I was going to manage it, but I meant to. Somehow. I’d just about decided to take a chance and go out to your house, ’Rene, or call up and arrange a meeting, when I ran into you. What luck!”

  Irene agreed that it was luck. “It’s the first time I’ve been home for five years, and now I’m about to leave. A week later and I’d have been gone. And how in the world did you find Gertrude?”

  “In the book. I remembered about Fred. His father still has the meat market.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Irene, who had only remembered it as Clare had spoken, “on Cottage Grove near—”

  Gertrude broke in. “No.It’s moved. We’re on Maryland Avenue—used to be Jackson—now. Near Sixty-third Street. And the market’s Fred’s. His name’s the same as his father’s.”

  Gertrude, Irene thought, looked as if her husband might be a butcher. There was left of her youthful prettiness, which had been so much admired in their high school days, no trace. She had grown broad, fat almost, and though there were no lines on her large white face, its very smoothness was somehow prematurely aging. Her black hair was clipped, and by some unfortunate means all the live curliness had gone from it. Her overtrimmed georgette crepe dress was too short and showed an appalling amount of leg, stout legs in sleazy stockings of a vivid rose-beige shade. Her plump hands were newly and not too competently manicured—for the occasion, probably. And she wasn’t smoking.

  Clare said—and Irene fancied that her husky voice held a slight edge—“Before you came, Irene, Gertrude was telling me about her two boys. Twins. Think of it! Isn’t it too marvelous for words?”

  Irene felt a warmness creeping into her cheeks. Uncanny, the way Clare could divine what one was thinking. She was a little put out, but her manner was entirely easy as she said: “That is nice. I’ve two boys myself, Gertrude. Not twins, though. It seems that Clare’s rather behind, doesn’t it?”

  Gertrude, however, wasn’t sure that Clare hadn’t the best of it. “She’s got a girl. I wanted a girl. So did Fred.”

  “Isn’t that a bit unusual?” Irene asked. “Most men want sons. Egotism, I suppose.”

  “Well, Fred didn’t.”

  The tea things had been placed on a low table at Clare’s side. She gave them her attention now, pouring the rich amber fluid from the tall glass pitcher into stately slim glasses, which she handed to her guests, and then offered them lemon or cream and tiny sandwiches or cakes.

  After taking up her own glass she informed them: “No, I have no boys and I don’t think I’ll ever have any. I’m afraid. I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I’ll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too—too hellish.”

  Gertrude Martin nodded in complete comprehension.

  This time it was Irene who said nothing.

  “You don’t have to tell me!” Gertrude said fervently. “I know what it is all right. Maybe you don’t think I wasn’t scared to death too. Fred said I was silly, and so did his mother. But, of course, they thought it was just a notion I’d gotten into my head and they blamed it on my condition. They don’t know like we do, how it might go way back, and turn out dark no matter what color the father and mother are.”

  Perspiration stood out on her forehead. Her narrow eyes rolled first in Clare’s, then in Irene’s direction. As she talked she waved her heavy hands about.

  “No,” she went on, “no more for me either. Not even a girl. It’s awful the way it skips generations and then pops out. Why, he actually said he didn’t care what color it turned out, if I would only stop worrying about it. But, of course, nobody wants a dark child.” Her voice was earnest and she took for granted that her audience was in entire agreement with her.

  Irene, whose head had gone up with a quick little jerk, now sa
id in a voice of whose even tones she was proud: “One of my boys is dark.”

  Gertrude jumped as if she had been shot at. Her eyes goggled. Her mouth flew open. She tried to speak but could not immediately get the words out. Finally she managed to stammer: “Oh! And your husband, is he—is he—er—dark too?”

  Irene, who was struggling with a flood of feelings, resentment, anger, and contempt, was, however, still able to answer as coolly as if she had not that sense of not belonging to and of despising the company in which she found herself drinking iced tea from tall amber glasses on that hot August afternoon. Her husband, she informed them quietly, couldn’t exactly “pass.”

  At that reply Clare turned on Irene her seductive caressing smile and remarked a little scoffingly: “I do think that colored people—we—are too silly about some things. After all, the thing’s not important to Irene or hundreds of others. Not awfully, even to you, Gertrude. It’s only deserters like me who have to be afraid of freaks of nature. As my inestimable dad used to say, ‘Everything must be paid for.’ Now, please, one of you tell me what ever happened to Claude Jones. You know, the tall, lanky specimen who used to wear that comical little mustache that the girls used to laugh at so. Like a thin streak of soot. The mustache, I mean.”

  At that Gertrude shrieked with laughter—“Claude Jones!”—and launched into the story of how he was no longer a Negro or a Christian but had become a Jew.

  “A Jew!” Clare exclaimed.

  “Yes, a Jew. A black Jew, he calls himself. He won’t eat ham and goes to the synagogue on Saturday. He’s got a beard now as well as a mustache. You’d die laughing if you saw him. He’s really too funny for words. Fred says he’s crazy and I guess he is. Oh, he’s a scream all right, a regular scream!” And she shrieked again.

  Clare’s laugh tinkled out. “It certainly sounds funny enough. Still, it’s his own business. If he gets along better by turning—”

  At that, Irene, who was still hugging her unhappy don’t-care feeling of rightness, broke in, saying bitingly: “It evidently doesn’t occur to either you or Gertrude that he might possibly be sincere in changing his religion. Surely everyone doesn’t do everything for gain.”

  Clare Kendry had no need to search for the full meaning of that utterance. She reddened slightly and retorted seriously: “Yes, I admit that might be possible—his being sincere, I mean. It just didn’t happen to occur to me, that’s all. I’m surprised,” and the seriousness changed to mockery, “that you should have expected it to. Or did you really?”

  “You don’t, I’m sure, imagine that that is a question that I can answer,” Irene told her. “Not here and now.”

  Gertrude’s face expressed complete bewilderment. However, seeing that little smiles had come out on the faces of the two other women and not recognizing them for the smiles of mutual reservations which they were, she smiled too.

  Clare began to talk, steering carefully away from anything that might lead towards race or other thorny subjects. It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weight lifting that Irene had ever seen. Her words swept over them in charming well-modulated streams. Her laughs tinkled and pealed. Her little stories sparkled.

  Irene contributed a bare “Yes” or “No” here and there. Gertrude, a “You don’t say!” less frequently.

  For a while the illusion of general conversation was nearly perfect. Irene felt her resentment changing gradually to a silent, somewhat grudging admiration.

  Clare talked on, her voice, her gestures, coloring all she said of wartime in France, of after-the-wartime in Germany, of the excitement at the time of the general strike in England, of dressmakers’ openings in Paris, of the new gaiety of Budapest.

  But it couldn’t last, this verbal feat. Gertrude shifted in her seat and fell to fidgeting with her fingers. Irene, bored at last by all this repetition of the selfsame things that she had read all too often in papers, magazines, and books, set down her glass and collected her bag and handkerchief. She was smoothing out the tan fingers of her gloves preparatory to putting them on when she heard the sound of the outer door being opened and saw Clare spring up with an expression of relief, saying: “How lovely! Here’s Jack at exactly the right minute. You can’t go now, ’Rene dear.”

  John Bellew came into the room. The first thing that Irene noticed about him was that he was not the man that she had seen with Clare Kendry on the Drayton roof. This man, Clare’s husband, was a tallish person, broadly made. His age she guessed to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. His hair was dark brown and waving, and he had a soft mouth, somewhat womanish, set in an unhealthy-looking dough-colored face. His steel-grey opaque eyes were very much alive, moving ceaselessly between thick bluish lids. But there was, Irene decided, nothing unusual about him, unless it was an impression of latent physical power.

  “Hello, Nig,” was his greeting to Clare.

  Gertrude, who had started slightly, settled back and looked covertly towards Irene, who had caught her lip between her teeth and sat gazing at husband and wife. It was hard to believe that even Clare Kendry would permit this ridiculing of her race by an outsider, though he chanced to be her husband. So he knew, then, that Clare was a Negro? From her talk the other day Irene had understood that he didn’t. But how rude, how positively insulting, for him to address her in that way in the presence of guests!

  In Clare’s eyes, as she presented her husband, was a queer gleam, a jeer, it might be. Irene couldn’t define it.

  The mechanical professions that attend an introduction over, she inquired: “Did you hear what Jack called me?”

  “Yes,” Gertrude answered, laughing with a dutiful eagerness.

  Irene didn’t speak. Her gaze remained level on Clare’s smiling face.

  The black eyes fluttered down. “Tell them, dear, why you call me that.”

  The man chuckled, crinkling up his eyes, not, Irene was compelled to acknowledge, unpleasantly. He explained: “Well, you see, it’s like this. When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well, as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger.”

  He roared with laughter. Clare’s ringing bell-like laugh joined his. Gertrude, after another uneasy shift in her seat, added her shrill one. Irene, who had been sitting with lips tightly compressed, cried out: “That’s good!” and gave way to gales of laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her sides ached. Her throat hurt. She laughed on and on and on, long after the others had subsided. Until, catching sight of Clare’s face, the need for a more quiet enjoyment of this priceless joke, and for caution, struck her. At once she stopped.

  Clare handed her husband his tea and laid her hand on his arm with an affectionate little gesture. Speaking with confidence as well as with amusement, she said: “My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two percent colored?”

  Bellew put out his hand in a repudiating fling, definite and final. “Oh, no, Nig,” he declared, “nothing like that with me. I know you’re no nigger, so it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I’m concerned, since I know you’re no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be.”

  Irene’s lips trembled almost uncontrollably, but she made a desperate effort to fight back her disastrous desire to laugh again, and succeeded. Carefully selecting a cigarette from the lacquered box on the tea table before her, she turned an oblique look on Clare and encountered her peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart. A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog. Absurd, her reason told her as she accepted Bellew’s proffered light for her cigarette. Another glance at Clare showed her smiling. So, as one always
ready to oblige, was Gertrude.

  An onlooker, Irene reflected, would have thought it a most con genial tea party, all smiles and jokes and hilarious laughter. She said humorously: “So you dislike Negroes, Mr. Bellew?” But her amusement was at her thought, rather than her words.

  John Bellew gave a short denying laugh. “You got me wrong there, Mrs. Redfield. Nothing like that at all. I don’t dislike them, I hate them. And so does Nig, for all she’s trying to turn into one. She wouldn’t have a nigger maid around her for love nor money. Not that I’d want her to. They give me the creeps. The black scrimy devils.”

  This wasn’t funny. Had Bellew, Irene inquired, ever known any Negroes? The defensive tone of her voice brought another start from the uncomfortable Gertrude, and, for all her appearance of serenity, a quick apprehensive look from Clare.

  Bellew answered: “Thank the Lord, no! And never expect to! But I know people who’ve known them, better than they know their black selves. And I read in the papers about them. Always robbing and killing people. And,” he added darkly, “worse.”

  From Gertrude’s direction came a queer little suppressed sound, a snort or a giggle. Irene couldn’t tell which. There was a brief silence, during which she feared that her self-control was about to prove too frail a bridge to support her mounting anger and indignation. She had a leaping desire to shout at the man beside her: “And you’re sitting here surrounded by three black devils, drinking tea.”

  The impulse passed, obliterated by her consciousness of the danger in which such rashness would involve Clare, who remarked with a gentle reprovingness: “Jack dear, I’m sure ’Rene doesn’t care to hear all about your pet aversions. Nor Gertrude either. Maybe they read the papers too, you know.” She smiled on him, and her smile seemed to transform him, to soften and mellow him, as the rays of the sun does a fruit.