by Dorothy West
CHAPTER EIGHT
At the moment Shelby’s door closed, Clark Coles placed his bare foot on the Oak Bluffs beach to begin his morning walk into town. The ferry landing was behind him, and he could just make out a boat in the distance, coming with a fresh brace of day trippers from Cape Cod. Clark hunched his shoulders against a chill wind blowing in off the water and stooped to roll his left pants leg up a little farther. He cherished these walks; lately they seemed to be his only chance to get away from the hubbub of the wedding. He stopped at a thin white pole that was listing to one side. Pushing it upright with two hands, he swept his foot through the sand to fill in the hole he had created so the pole would stay upright. It was a funny thing, these poles, the way they divided the beach. Corinne would always meet her friends at the twelfth pole, but Shelby and her young group always congregated around the nineteenth, and the young married couples put down their blankets even farther up. Clark guessed that Shelby and Meade would move up themselves next summer—that is, if they came to the island at all.
Clark shook his head. He would never have chosen Meade as a likely mate for his daughter, but it hadn’t seemed of late that he’d done a particularly good job choosing a bride himself, so he guessed he couldn’t speak as an authority. He glanced at a gnarled piece of driftwood and stepped around it. At least she seemed happy. Was Clark that happy the day before he married Corinne? He honestly couldn’t remember. He put his hands in his pockets and rubbed his ringers together. That really wasn’t a fair question, he thought, since people today seemed to marry based on a whim, based on some here-today-gone-tomorrow flight of fancy, without a glance at the more practical considerations that seemed to mean everything in Clark’s day. The reasons his daughter had for choosing Meade were so different from his and Corinne’s that the single word “marriage” seemed insufficient to describe both events, lacking the flexibility to stretch to both poles.
Clark shook his head again. It had all happened so fast. He and several other Northern-educated doctors young enough to be altruistic had accepted an invitation to attend a month-long series of panels on modern techniques in medicine at the college where Corinne’s father Hannibal was president and Corinne reigned as campus queen.
Clark had been automatically given access to the highest circles of the society in which he found himself. He had all the proper credentials, coming as he did from a family of physicians, all of whom, including his father, were sons of fair Harvard. As the youngest of three brothers, all successful general practitioners who lived prosperously on Strivers’ Row in Harlem (a street so called because of the prominence and pretensions of this envied and imitated group of professional men and their pretty wives), he was determined to excel in any area that offered a challenge. He was the first of his family to get an office in a white doctors’ building downtown, obtained through strings pulled by a fellow grad of Harvard Medical School, and he was on his way to becoming a brilliant diagnostician. He was beginning to gain recognition from some of the top men in his field, and he had a growing pool of patients who were willing to ignore his race to avail themselves of his talents. Those of his white patients who did not know that he was colored were not too dismayed when they learned it; they decided, as whites generally did, that he was an exception to the general run of his race, a freak, a flash of lightning that would probably not strike his generation again, their knowledge of the colored man and his genes being limited to the creations of their cooks.
Clark’s brothers had married attractive, educated women who had given them sons clearly destined for Harvard as well, as evinced by the little crimson emblems sewed on their tiny sweaters. Clark meant to marry better and have at least one more Harvard-bound son than his brothers. His brothers had all chosen Northern brides, but Clark had a theory, by no means original, that the South produced the colored woman nonpareil. Washington was generally accepted as the place to start the search, the charm and beauty of its women attributed to generous infusions of the blood of senators, men who, though rarely beautiful or charming themselves, managed with the help of their colored mistresses to produce exceptional qualities in their children and their children’s children. Yes, the rarefied nature of Washington women was a legend in sophisticated colored circles.
When Clark met Corinne, then, it was a meeting of two perfect people. She was the daughter of a college president, and he could never hope to marry better than that. But neither of them was interested. In Sabina, Corinne’s brown classmate, Clark had found the perfect girl-woman, and he wanted to marry her. He had not had time for love before, and until he met Sabina he had never experienced the emotion that is blind to color lines and racial bars and class divisions and religious prejudices and all the other imposed criteria that have nothing to do with love but have so much to do with marriage.
For ten blissful days he saw Sabina whenever their time coincided, and each meeting was a fresh discovery of her sweetness. Her color never crossed his mind except in admiration, and her scholarship status, and the simple background that it implied, made him want to give her more than she had ever had. He knew that he had found his girl, and he was almost as sure that he had found his wife. At the unforeseen perfect moment before he returned to New York he intended to propose. He would need all the time he could get in between to pray that she would not refuse.
He could not know that a campaign was planned behind his back to wean this very eligible visitor away from a lowly scholarship student and match him with someone better. And of course there was no one better than Corinne, who was his peer in all the important details, those ironclad facts of background that made the fundamentals of love seem secondary. Every blue-veined hostess was pressed into giving a party for the visiting doctors. In the roundabout parlance of politeness, Sabina was not expected at any party. She would not cry foul and claim that she had been deliberately ignored, nor in all fairness could she. She was just one of the many students who did not even know the people who were having the affairs. There wasn’t any issue, and to create one would have been unthinkable.
As a visitor from the North, with an imposed obligation to represent the section, the class, the culture from whence he had come, Clark had no gracious way of rejecting the seemingly good intentions of his hosts to display their fabled hospitality. In keeping with the spirit of giving, an animated bouquet of the year’s most popular debs was presented to the visiting doctors as dates for the duration. It was inevitable, it was arranged, that Clark would draw Corinne out of the nonexistent hat, for to everyone except themselves their coming together had the full consent of heaven.
Though no one agreed more than Gram, she thought it the better part of wisdom to give heaven human assistance. In June, Corinne would graduate, and whatever restraints within which Gram held her because of school and study would be in effect no longer. Corinne would come into the ripeness of her twenty-first birthday amid the full-blown summer of the South, which boiled the blood more than the meager summer of the North. Gram was already past seventy, and weary of the night watch. She was quietly resolved to see Corinne married to this mannerly, fair-colored doctor before she had time to make a misstep in the dark of some deep wood with some dark man who would not even try to break her fall. In the long, bedeviling summer of the South, a yielding woman without benefit of miracles could bear the child of many fathers. Gram wanted to see her settled up North, where the ruling passion was ambition and men sought the smile of success more than the favors of love, finding this gilded goddess more fruitful with her golden children than the most abundant woman.
Gram cut her plan of action to the order of Corinne’s vanity. She never dwelled on the merits of marriage. Indeed, she had never seen in her own limited relations with Augustus or Josephine’s dismal journey into Nirvana anything to recommend marriage as a union of loving hearts in which much was given and much was received. In Corinne’s childhood years, the years of dolls and simple pleasures, Gram had never let herself look ahead to the time when Corinne would
come into consciousness of herself as a woman, whose logical counterpart was man. Gram had lived without a man in bed beside her, and so had Josephine. Hannibal had always been too buried in someone else’s history to care about his own family’s future, but Gram cared, and while she knew that Corinne could never marry white, she allowed herself to hope against hope that she’d never marry colored either. But when Corinne reached her riper teens, and boys and clothes and the blossoming of her own beauty became her feverish concern, Gram saw what Hannibal was too preoccupied to see, seeing only Miss Caroline in the aging, worn image of Gram whenever he took the time to look over his glasses. Gram saw that all the dried-out, arrested passion in Hannibal, and in Josephine, and in herself whose life in love had been brief and unrewarding—spent as it was with a man too sorry for himself to give joy to a woman—all that unspent passion had somehow seeped into the blood of this young woman and was now biding its time until it exploded.
Even in Corinne’s early teens, when a child, though a child, can still bear a child, Gram had been forced to play the role of watchdog duenna, reluctantly reigning dowager in the circle of mothers at parties. She never trusted Corinne to go home with a servant, who could be bribed or cajoled into letting her slip through her fingers. As the better part of wisdom, Gram was forced to encourage Corinne to entertain at home, where she could keep watch in a nearby room, shooing her granddaughter back into a lighted parlor whenever she wandered toward the dark outdoors with a brown boy at the ready (though far from ready for responsibility) breathing hard behind her. That Corinne remained above reproach until the day she married Clark was due in no small part to Gram’s unremitting vigilance, and to the obsessive fear it bred of getting caught with a dark boy’s baby.
Corinne walked in virtue, but everything in her walk, and in her voice, and in her eyes was a promise of pleasure to come. She seemed the cream of women, a woman who had much to give but who would not squander it, bred from birth to keep it intact for the man she would marry. She would grace his home with her charm and beauty and she would make his bed joyous, all without ever having to shame his hearth with another man’s memory of her shamelessness. And so she bided her time, waiting for marriage to release her from the cage of her ignorance, to give her the right to make bold inquiry. Then she could free that second self, the dark devourer, the primitive behind the pale skin.
Gram did not know and could not have imagined the size of the monster that stalked Corinne, or the multifold shapes it would assume. All that Gram knew about girls who couldn’t wait was what she had seen when a weeping coed was whisked off campus before her rounding belly brought open disgrace to the school. To Gram, the lesson to be learned was that some girls should marry young or come to grief as unwed mothers. Where the embarrassing problem of sex reared its head, the only place to solve it was the marriage bed. Gram’s iron will ensured Corinne’s restraint, and it also ensured that Clark would not escape from her orbit. Another colored generation would claim a share of Gram’s blood, but with her willing it; better to see that blood in the fair-tinted face of a child born with God’s blessing than turn to ink in a child turned black as the devil whose thrust had spawned it.
The final end-of-the-season party of the frenetic social whirl that had embraced Clark might have been designed for Gram’s purpose. The slightly hyperthyroid hostess put all her captive guests through all the ingenious tortures that an all-night party can inflict, winding up the program with scrambled eggs at seven. When Clark brought Corinne home, obviously tired and clearly showing that she was also tired of Clark, Gram surmised at once that nothing had happened, nothing bad of course, but nothing good either. They had a lackluster look to them, nothing like the aura of two people in love. Their feet were too tired from dancing to walk on air, and their heads were too heavy with sleep to care about clouds.
Gram got rid of Corinne by packing her off to Hannibal’s study to let him see that his only child had returned to the fold neither maimed nor molested. These extremes had not even occurred to Hannibal, who had slept untroubled throughout the night, unaware that his daughter’s virgin bed was empty of its occupant. When she entered his private world he was having breakfast from a tray, a history book propped in front of him. Politely and absently he listened to Corinne, praising her pretty dress; he drew no significance from the hour of its attire. Corinne’s voice fell on his ears like the sound of a distant skirmish to a restless sentry, and her image was blurred by the sight of the printed page in front of him.
Alone with Clark, Gram inclined her head toward a chair, and she and Clark sat together in the formal hallway. They both kept their backs ramrod straight, Gram to hold her tired old body together, Clark to keep from falling asleep in the quiet after the long night’s clamor. They faced each other across their worlds, the bridge between them lowered for the crossing when Gram permitted Clark to sit in her presence. The significance of her dispensation escaped him, though his easy compliance did not escape her. Spearing Clark’s eyes with her own, Gram refused to let her mind succumb to weariness until Corinne’s future was settled.
Clark braced himself for a dressing down; no doubt this grandam had put two and two together and made the usual error in that kind of nasty, half-cocked addition. It was true enough that some busybodies were trying to make a romance out of his dates with Corinne, forgetting or ignoring the fact that they had been no more to each other than names in a hat. This old lady had probably heard the gossip, which was always two-headed when heard third or fourth hand. And since he had shown no evidence of honorable intentions, made no call on Corinne’s father, made no mention of Corinne’s meeting his family, he could understand that an anxious grandmother, looking at him in evening clothes in the morning hours, might suspect a wolf underneath the fancy trappings.
She didn’t know her granddaughter, he thought to himself. She could handle herself. He hadn’t got to first base with her. He hadn’t really worked on it, but they were both young and the moon was bright and her lips had barely responded to the kiss he supposed she was expecting when he brought her home from a party. In fact, she seemed to have a thing for dark men. At least she gave them most of her dances. He was lucky if he got her first dance and her last. He didn’t mind admitting that he wasn’t good at shaking a leg; it made him feel self-conscious, like making love in public. But surely Corinne didn’t expect to dance her way through life. Didn’t she know that a doctor’s hand held as much skill as a dancer’s feet? Not that he wanted her to admire him. Not that he wanted her to get serious about him. But he couldn’t help but feel piqued that he had made so little impression on her. She was pretty enough to be a challenge to any man, and he was male enough to wish he could boast to his friends that he could have had a college president’s daughter for the snapping of his fingers, except that she was second string to a girl named Sabina.
Sabina … He had demanded more than was fair of her understanding. But he had fallen in love with her because there was empathy between them, this communication that silence and separation couldn’t alter. She would forgive him this innocent defection. He, who had squandered so much of her patience, was impatient to hear her say that he had not. But for Sabina’s sake he could not leave until this old woman’s unconvinced eyes believed the simple truth that nothing had been created between himself and her granddaughter that could not be ended now and forever. He searched his mind for words that would make clear this total absence of design without being inelegant or ungallant. When they were said and accepted, he would leave their lives with the assumption that he would be forgotten before the falling of the leaves.
“Young man,” Gram said, “are you in love with my daughter?”
Every thought that Clark had collected flew out of his mind. He felt his face redden like a schoolboy’s. “Whatever my feelings,” he said wildly, “I’m sure your granddaughter is not in love with me.”
“How do you know, young man? Have you asked her?”
“Of course not, ma’am, I wouldn
’t ask such a conceited question.”
“Nonsense! The world wouldn’t last very long if everyone were as bashful as you.”
That stung him. “I’m not a boy, I’m twenty-eight, ma’am. I’m also a doctor. I could hardly claim to be bashful before women. But I’m also a gentleman. I respect your granddaughter’s right to choose for herself without persuasion.”
“And if she chose you?”
He could think of nothing else to say, so he muttered miserably, “I would be honored.”
Gram rose. “I’m very tired, young man. I hope you’ll excuse me. I’m old, past seventy. I don’t expect to live forever. I want to see my motherless granddaughter settled before I die.” She tried to think of his first name: “Carl” or “Clark” or something beginning with C. But it didn’t matter, thank God; he too could be called Doctor.
Clark proposed to Corinne after two weeks of escorting her places. In the fourth week a date was set, invitations were sent out, a wedding dress selected, and all the other arrangements of a spectacular happening put in place. The wedding was accomplished without a hitch.
Clark shook himself from his reverie and looked at his watch. He was running late; he had errands to run for Corinne. What was done was done. He was fifty-two. Twenty-four years was long enough for any man to have to live with a mistake. He turned and headed for home, soothed by the thought that if all went as planned his time of penance was almost at an end.
CHAPTER NINE
If in Gram’s distorted eye Liz’s baby Laurie was a carbon copy of Hannibal, if in Liz’s biased eye Laurie was the wonder child of the world, an impartial eye presented with an album of Laurie’s ancestors might have lingered longest on a tintype of a preacher, Preacher Coles, born a slave around the time that Gram was born the daughter of blue-blooded slave owners, living and dying without ever knowing that Gram existed, but cofounder of the same family nonetheless.
