The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

“But you wanted to go to Mississippi for the Emmett Till trial, and he wouldn’t let you!”

  “That was outrage. This is action. Black people just always expect the back of the bus. And that’s where white folks expect to see them. But now, well, there’s no one in the back of the bus, and there’s not gonna be anyone in the back of the bus until those old habits, expectations, yes, even those laws!—till they get broken up and set to rights. This is gonna change what people think. What they expect to see. This is the first big step since Reconstruction.”

  “But what’s the point of living in California if you’re just going to go back to Alabama? We don’t have laws like that here.”

  “Oh, come on, Roxanne! You and I can’t even have a sandwich together without the locals looking for a rope. California ain’t Mississippi, but it ain’t heaven either, and it ain’t like the old hymn where all God’s children got wings.” He finished his drink, stood up, and paced. “It’s like there’s a deep channel, a well of unrest and hate and ugliness that runs under this whole country. It’s there. It’s never gone away. Not just the violence visited on a boy like Emmett Till, but the daily violence, indignities that everyone expects, shit that no one can shake free of. Admit it, when you first met me, you thought I was Reg’s help. You thought I should stand up and hotfoot it out there to tell Reg you arrived! People like me existed to park your car or pump your gas.”

  “I don’t think that anymore, Terrence. Give me some credit for growing up.”

  “I do, baby! But it’s like I’ve been saying to you all along! America has to grow up. We got one person, Mrs. Parks, saying, ‘Enough!’ Mrs. Parks knew exactly what she was doing. Exactly. She told Reverend Cooke she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused to stand up so that white man could sit down. The Montgomery Improvement Association knows what they’re doing. And so does Mr. Branch. And so do I.” He took a deep breath. “This is my moment, baby. I gotta grab it.”

  The stories rolled round in my head, awful stories of terrible things done to black men in places like Mississippi and Alabama. I’d seen it myself, here in California in the raid on the Comet Club, how much worse Negroes were treated. My heart constricted to think of the danger he would be in. There flashed in my mind a glimmer of why Coralee and Ruby and Clarence were so hostile to me. If I loved Terrence, and I did, if I was going to be with him, and I was, then I had to accept what being with him meant. “I hope you’re not driving the Porsche.”

  “If those crackers see me in a Porsche, they’re like to string me up before I hit the city limits. No, I’ll ride the train.”

  “Where will you stay?”

  “I got my trusty Green Book to tell me all the places that will feed and shelter Negroes in the Cradle of the Confederacy, Miss Scarlett.”

  “Please don’t call me that. Not even as a joke.”

  “Sorry, baby.” He reached out and ran his hands over my hair.

  “You’ll be in danger.”

  “I’m in danger here. Right now. With you. What we’re doing is dangerous.”

  “Not the same kind of danger.”

  “Oh yes, the same kind of danger. Why else would we have to keep ourselves a secret?”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Long as it takes.”

  “Long as what takes?”

  “I don’t even know the answer to that, Roxanne. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It won’t be pretty, but it’s necessary.”

  I will remember that night for as long as I live. Knowing he would leave in the morning impressed even the smallest detail on my heart and mind. We had dinner, and I gave him the Christmas present I’d been saving, a fountain pen with a solid gold nib. We made love, and when at last we released each other, sweaty, satiated, the sheets damp with exertion and scented with the tang of passion spent, I held him in my arms. I did not want to sleep. Neither did he. He lit up, and the cigarette glowed in the dark.

  “This preacher who’s leading the Montgomery Improvement Association, a Dr. King, he preaches out of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.”

  “You think that’s named for your father’s family?” I nudged him gently.

  “You think any street in Montgomery, Alabama, gonna be named for a black family?” Terrence scoffed. He smoked in silence for a few moments. “The truth is, baby, I don’t know the first thing about my father’s family. Daddy never talked about Alabama, never told us any stories, except for a few war stories where he was a mechanic in France. None of his Alabama relatives ever visited Los Angeles. A letter might arrive now and then saying that someone had died or married. For a while there would be a fruitcake every Christmas, then that stopped.”

  “Didn’t your family have to write to someone when he died?”

  “He didn’t die. I know I told you, that first day we met, that both my parents were dead, but it wasn’t true. Really, he might just as well have died. One day he just didn’t come home. His clothes were still in the closet, his shaving mug was in the bathroom—he left everything except the car and family savings. We never saw him again, and never heard a word from him either.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I’ve been saying he died for so many years, it just seemed like it was true. Anyway, what does it matter? He probably is dead by now, and I hardly remember him at all. Except for his hands.”

  “What about his hands?”

  “He came home every night and his hands were seamed with grease, and Mama would say, go wash your hands and we’ll eat, and he wouldn’t do it. Like he was proud of them. He’d say you can’t wash off black, and give Mama a look just daring her to make more of it. Some nights he’d go all around the table where the girls were doing their homework, and he’d leave grease smudges, dirt, oil from his hands all over their homework, all over the Baptist church bulletin Mama had in her typewriter. Sometimes she’d call him on it, and he’d take after Mama, and there would be a lot of noise and chairs falling over, that kind of thing, but he knew he never dared go too far, not with all her family nearby. You can imagine what they thought of him. Clarence especially. Clarence and the white gloves.”

  “Why didn’t your mother divorce him?”

  “Maybe your people divorce, Liza Jane, but not Addie Dexter. Out of the question. Truth to tell, we were all sort of relieved when he left. Life was easier. No more rages and cursing. The girls were older, but I was only six, and Booker was four. Mama already had a job cooking at Ruby’s, so it wasn’t like we were suddenly broke. The girls looked after us while Mama worked. We had to move to a duplex, but we stayed in the same neighborhood. Clarence stepped in to be a father to us. After a time, Booker and me just started saying our Daddy was dead. It was easier all round, at the school, you know? We said it so often, we came to believe it. The whole family. It quit feeling like a lie.” He put out the cigarette, slid his arm underneath my shoulders, rolled me on my side and brought his lips to the back of my neck until I shuddered with delight. “Say me something in French, Liza Jane.”

  The next morning I managed to help him pack without crying, but when he snapped the Royal into its case, that’s when I knew for sure he was leaving. I hid my tears, putting my head against his chest, and we held each other for a long time, while we murmured endearments and he hummed “Little Liza Jane.” It was a bright December morning with clouds scudding high at the horizon, the sea gunmetal gray, and the uncaring waves pounding the beach. I carried the suitcase, and tucked my arm closer to his as we walked down the stairs, and bent my head against the wind as we rounded the corner. He lifted the garage door and put the Royal and the suitcase in the Porsche.

  “I’m going to miss you, Liza Jane, miss this place, miss what we’ve got together.”

  “It will still be here when you come home. I will still be here. I will wait for you. Be safe. Come home to me. I’ll never forgive you if you don’t come hom
e to me.” I stood on tiptoe, flung my arms around his shoulders, and kissed him. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” I whispered before I let him go.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I can’t believe this!” I said to Thelma a few days later with the latest Challenger in hand. “Here’s what the Montgomery Improvement Association is asking from the city. This is all they want, and they’re being denied? Is it really too much to ask that the drivers should be courteous? Is that revolutionary? That they should hire black drivers for black neighborhoods and that the buses should stop at every block in the black neighborhoods like they do in the white neighborhoods? That seating on the bus should be first come, first served? Is that so outrageous?”

  “Here’s today’s mail,” she said, smiling. “Terrence’s letter is on top.”

  Thursday

  Little Liza Jane,

  I have to rethink my every breath and step here. Which fountain to drink from, which window to go to for an ice cream, which door to enter. At least I don’t have to remember to ride at the back of the bus. No one here is riding the bus. They walk. Miles and miles. As Dr. King says, the boycott is not just a right, a legal right, it is a duty. The Montgomery Improvement Association has set up places, lots owned by black businesses, and people come there, and drivers will take them to and from work. Any Negro with a set of wheels is driving. People can’t pay the drivers, that would break the law, but they give money to the MIA, and they pay the drivers.

  These drivers know they’ll get arrested for going 29 in a 25 zone, for going 29 in a 30 zone. They’ll arrest you for looking up or looking down. For speaking or humming or doing anything but shuffling along and whistling Dixie. I am in the land of cotton, all right. They arrested Mrs. Cooke for having a broken taillight that wasn’t broken before the cop asked her to step outside the car to look at it. Then he broke it.

  Write me at the address on this envelope, honey, Reverend Cooke’s house. I’m moving out of the hotel after Christmas. His youngest son is at Howard University, and I can have his room. Reverend Cooke has been really good to me. Staying with him, I’ll be closer to the MIA leaders, and he’ll let me use his phone to call Ben Tupper with my stories. I can’t use Western Union or I’m sure to be arrested as an outside agitator. My press card means shit here. White folks refuse to recognize me as a reporter. I can’t even interview city officials. Newspapermen from all over the country, television cameras too, are crawling all over Montgomery, and they’re labeled outside agitators, even the white guys.

  Living with a preacher’s family will keep me nice and proper. I’ll have to watch myself for sure. When I see you next, baby, I’ll probably call you ma’am, and I will surely rise when you walk in the room. (Any room except the bedroom.) Keep yourself sweet and safe, baby.

  Love,

  Terrence

  PS: I have to tell you, Liza Jane, something strange. I keep thinking of my daddy, ever since I got here. He hardly ever crossed my mind at home in California, but here, I feel like I keep seeing him or his ghost or some such thing I have no word for. Not yet anyway. What would I say to him? What would he say to me?

  His letters to me often held the germ of his published pieces in the Challenger, but they were far more passionate, unguarded. And if they were less polished, they were more vivid. We talked on the phone perhaps once a week, short, intense, expensive calls. Oddly, the phone calls were less satisfying to me than his letters. He always added some little intimate thought or endearment to his letters, but he could not always do that on the phone. He called from such public pay phones (undifferentiated voices and noise in the background, sometimes the stentorian roll of a church organ, sometimes honky-tonk guitars and the crack of billiard balls) that when I said I loved him, he could not really respond that he loved me too.

  Living without him, I realized how much I had come to count on Terrence’s sheer presence for the rhythms of everyday life. The sounds of the typewriter, his banging out old tunes on the piano, cooking together, washing the dishes, reading by the fireplace, going to bed together. I felt like a seed rattling around in the empty husk of my own life. I reminded myself of those lonely frontier women like Jean Arthur in Shane—look how strong they were. Surely I could do the same. I did the things that lonely women do, like defrost the fridge. I framed the two photographs Thelma had taken of us. I took one of them to bed with me and put the other on the desk. When I went out for a walk on the beach, Bruno always bounded over, looking all around for Terrence before settling for second best, me. One afternoon just before Christmas Mr. Wilbur brought out Bruno’s leash and remarked that he was glad to see I had come to my senses.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that colored man isn’t around anymore.”

  “Terrence is not colored, Mr. Wilbur. If anything”—I touched my cheek—“I am colored. Red and white, you see?” I offered brightly, happy for the first time in my life to have a birthmark.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The family gathered on Christmas afternoon at Gordon and Irene’s glass-and-steel Benedict Canyon home, for which I was grateful. I could not have endured lunch in the vast, antiqued dining room at Summit Drive with Denise Dell sitting where Julia once presided over Christmas.

  Denise was in no mood to be gracious in any event. Cross and sulky, wearing a dress with a skirt so bouffant it ballooned across the couch like a peony, she glared at all of us, as if the whole Greene family were somehow to blame for her unwanted condition. (Which, Irene informed me sotto voce when I arrived, was absolutely not to be mentioned—a totally forbidden topic.) The person who might have been to blame for Denise’s condition, Jonathan Moore, was attentive to her, and occasionally their eyes met, but there was no overt intimacy. Jonathan’s lips might have lingered overlong on the cigarette he lit for her, and her fingertips might have lingered overlong when he passed it to her, but I was probably the only one who noticed. As we drank cocktails in the living room, Leon kept his arm around Denise, gazing upon her with the single-minded adoration usually reserved for Romans gazing at Caesar in the sword-and-sandal flicks.

  Phil Tobin and his wife joined us. His wife, a bubbling font of energy, insisted on rounding up Irene’s savage children to sing along while she played Christmas carols on the grand piano. I made myself a second martini before lunch and played with the slender gold bracelet I wore, my Christmas present from Terrence, sent from Alabama.

  At lunch Gordon sat at the head of the table, Irene at the other end. Leon sat between Elsie and Denise. He patted her hand reflexively, encouraging her to eat, though she picked at her food, which had been expertly if soullessly catered. (I recognized as much now that I was cooking myself.) Jonathan and I sat across from them, and Phil and his wife beside us. The children were all at Irene’s end of the table, at Leon’s request. He doted on them, but they annoyed Denise. They would have annoyed a Botticelli angel. The youngest, Cindy, sat in a high chair banging on the tray. The twins were dueling with their forks. Gordon Junior picked broccoli off his plate and let it fall to the floor, where one of the white-gloved waiters picked it up and took it away. Then he dropped another piece. Irene told him if he did it again, she would have him spanked.

  The waiters were all temporary help hired for the occasion. Negroes, I noticed. When the kitchen door swung open, I caught a glimpse of Eudonna standing there supervising the waiters and watching over the kitchen staff with a gimlet eye. Why wasn’t Eudonna home with her own family? The question would never have occurred to me before Terrence came into my life. Then I thought of all those Christmas dinners at Summit Drive that Clarence had presided over. He had recovered from his operation in September and was back at work, but today, since Leon, Denise, and Elsie were here, surely he would have Christmas at home with Ruby and little Serena and their other grandchildren and their parents, with Terrence’s sisters and their husbands and children. Maybe Booker was there with
his trumpet, and maybe he was in a good mood, and maybe he brought his musician friends from the Comet Club, and maybe they were playing jazzy bebop arrangements of Christmas songs in the living room.

  Why is it, I thought, that Clarence and Julia should so closely connect our families, and yet . . . I closed my eyes briefly and tried to imagine all of us at one long, noisy table, Clarence and Ruby and their children and grandchildren, Coralee and her husband and kids, Leon, Denise, Elsie, Irene, Gordon, their kids, Booker and the musicians, Terrence and the Cookes from Alabama, Mr. Branch, the Tobins, me and Jonathan, just celebrating Christmas together connected by the bonds of time, and affection, goodwill and respect. For a moment I could see it all before me, like some ghost of Christmas yet to come, and then Phil touched my elbow and asked me to pass the gravy. Twice.

  PART IV

  A House Made of Straw

  1956

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  In Southern California, once New Year’s is over, it’s spring. The narcissus pop up, the rains come, and the hills turn a tender, leathery green, and lupines and ice plants dot the headlands and canyons. That January, work settled into a certain amount of ho-hum with no major breakthroughs or excitement, except when Terrence’s letters arrived, or, less pleasantly, the occasional appearance of Popeye. Thelma and I continued our routine precautions like the matchbook in the door, and we cut off all contact with Max and Marian. We all agreed that only in an emergency would we be in touch. How we would get in contact, we didn’t say, and honestly, we didn’t know.

  Right after New Year’s, Leon insisted on taking Denise to Tahoe. He offered to take Irene too, but she declined, even though she could have left her kids with the long-suffering Josefina. She stayed behind to be supportive of Gordon, on whose shoulders fell the unenviable weight of running the studio. She also had no wish to go to Tahoe, because Denise was still in such a rage that only Leon could stand to be around her. Even Elsie remained in Los Angeles to oversee the renovations at Summit Drive as builders and decorators swarmed in to create a second-floor suite for the soon-to-be infant.