The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  The preacher gave long opening remarks, and Booker played several soul-stirring hymns, solos backed by his sax man and a pianist, hymns I recognized from hearing Terrence pound them out on the upright. The choir director signaled the organist; the choir and congregation stood, and everyone sang together. The lady next to me handed me a hymnal. She didn’t need it, and I did. I wished I had one of those little fans all the ladies were using to cool themselves. The fans advertised the funeral home.

  The sermon bidding farewell to Clarence Goodall was punctuated with a lot of lively input from the audience—I mean, the congregation—sobs, sniffles, laughter, shouts of Amen! The pastor was vivacious and mobile and spoke at length and lovingly of Clarence’s devotion to duty, never mentioning that that duty was to a white family. He didn’t mention the Greenes at all. He spoke of how Clarence had been a good father not only to his own children, but to his fatherless nieces and nephews as well, how his innate dignity touched and inspired everyone who knew him. I got misty listening to him tell Clarence’s story as though it were a film unfolding, with certain peaks where he cued the musicians, and they played a few bars of something stirring, exactly like a movie soundtrack. Perhaps Terrence’s church and mine weren’t so very far apart after all.

  “At the end of his life Clarence Goodall was an example of Christian fortitude amid the woes of the flesh,” said the pastor, “which he met with unshaken faith and the hope of resurrection, and he surely has been admitted to a glorious heaven, where the righteous will be forgiven their sins, and rewarded for their strength of spirit, and shine forever in the light of Almighty God. Amen.”

  He nodded to a deacon and they closed the casket. I was so far at the back, I could see none of this, but I heard someone, a woman, break out in anguished sobs.

  We stood for the closing hymn, “Amazing Grace,” and six men stepped from the pews and moved to Clarence Goodall’s coffin. They lifted it onto their shoulders and started up the aisle. One of these men at the front of the coffin was Booker. His face, when he saw me, turned to a granite mask of anger. And one of these men was Terrence. I had no idea he was back, and my heart raced, filled with Hallelujah! just to see him. As our eyes locked, Terrence’s expression swiftly fluttered with a range of emotions I cannot describe. When he had passed by I found the verse in the hymnal, and I let my voice soar, though I knew I shouldn’t be joyous at a funeral.

  The congregation vacated the church in an orderly fashion, from the front to the back, so everyone had to walk past me in the last pew. I knew very few. Ruby, on the arm of her daughter, glanced at me with a look of chagrin. Coralee and her husband, frowning; Serena and her parents. Serena (who knew no better) smiled, waved. A woman who could only have been Terrence’s other sister scowled at me. Mr. Branch, his wheelchair pushed by Ben Tupper, nodded to me sadly. I recognized Mr. Wilkie and his wife. Men and women, black and white, who had served at Summit Drive during Clarence’s long tenure there murmured or nodded as they passed me. As for my own family, Gordon gave me a dyspeptic smile. Irene’s eyes held something that looked like warning. Leon regarded me oddly, as if I were wearing a clown suit and a red rubber nose, utterly out of place here. As for Denise, she merely looked right through me, willing my atoms to disperse under her glare. Quite the best performance I’d ever seen her give.

  From the church we all made our way to the parking lot out back, where the sun cooked down on the blacktop. Standing beside my car was Terrence Dexter. He looked thinner, or at least he’d lost the weight he’d gained in Alabama. He wore a smart, double-breasted dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, with black polished shoes. His face remained serious, but his deep, dark eyes, I could tell, his eyes took me in.

  “Is this your car? It looks like your car, but it’s the wrong color.”

  “I had to have it painted,” I said, feeling my way around each word as if it were a stone in my mouth. I could not bear to speak of the red paint, the dead dog. Not here. Not now.

  “Can I ride with you to the cemetery?”

  “Sure.” I did not trust myself to say more. I could feel my birthmark flooding with color. I’m sure he could see it too as I got in behind the wheel and started the car.

  The sprightly firefly MG T nosed into line with Leon’s chauffeur-driven Bentley, behind all the other enormous cars with vast tail fins: Plymouths, Dodges, and Chevys. As a cortege, we followed the hearse to the cemetery.

  “When did you get back?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember. A while. A month maybe. Six weeks?”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed that it had been that long, and I never knew.

  “Ruby wrote me how Clarence up and quit the Greenes, that he was dying. Soon as I got her letter, I knew I had to come back. I never thanked Clarence, never even recognized what he did for us after my daddy left, how he stepped in, as best he could. I wanted to thank him while there was time. I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “I’m sure he was happy to see you.”

  “Not at first. No, he was still real angry with me for taking up with you. Bone-marrow-deep angry. I had to ask his forgiveness.”

  “And did you?”

  “I did. You don’t split hairs or bluster, or make excuses for yourself, with a dying man.”

  “He loved you and Booker. I’m sure of that,” I said, remembering Clarence’s passion on behalf of his nephews in that last terrible exchange I had with him. I heard Terrence gulp, but only the engine murmured in the silence between us.

  “I met Sidney Bechet while I was in Paris,” he said at last. “I went with Jerrold and Annette a few times to hear him in one of those little boîtes. Seeing him play, being right there—how could I have thought he was anything but brilliant? I brought some records back with me, and I made Booker listen.”

  “And?”

  “Booker’s a West Coast Cool man. But I’m a Bechet convert. I guess I’m a convert to the Church of Rick and Ilsa too. I learned a lot from working with Jerrold on The Oubliette.” He shook his head, and a tiny, audible scoff escaped his lips. “Pretty damned weird, my working on a film about an African man who falls in love with a white girl and tries to forget her.”

  “If you had put your address on the aerogramme, I would have written back to you.”

  “I didn’t want you to write back. I didn’t want to hear from you. I didn’t want to think about you. I just wanted you to know I was sorry about your agency.”

  “I appreciated your note.”

  Like acquaintances, we offered pale inanities to each other, including the weather. Saying nothing of our shared past, Terrence and I seemed to be testing each other the way you would gingerly test a bruise. Does it hurt more? Does it hurt less? He was considerably less exuberant than he used to be; perhaps living in a foreign country had subdued him. But then, experience had subdued me too, and I hadn’t been anywhere at all.

  “How is Thelma?” he asked after we’d agreed the weather was unusually hot for September.

  I rattled on a bit about our working life at Paragon, and he nodded. He asked after Max and I said he was in England, and at least he was working.

  “And Jonathan. What’s he doing?”

  “I only know what I read about him in the papers. He’s a big star now. He never calls or comes over. He stays away from scandal.”

  “Well, he isn’t much of a loss to you. Just my opinion. You probably don’t need him anyway, not to go out dancing, or play tennis. You probably have a new flame.”

  “I play tennis at Irene’s. I don’t go out much. I’m fine on my own. And you? Are you back with Jaylene?”

  “Nah. She’ll never be coming back from New York. Why should she? Her career’s going great there. No, I’m on my own too.”

  As we followed the other cars and the MG’s heat needle inched upward, we spoke of the Montgomery bus boycott, which was still going on while appeals to the convictions of Rever
end Cooke, Dr. King, Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, and the others dragged through the courts. Terrence had written articles about the political and historical significance of the boycott for the Paris Tribune. I mentioned my baby uncle, Aaron, but I didn’t say that Leon and I had reconciled. I did not want to tread so close to the turbulent past. We were both carefully avoiding any suggestion of the intimate, saying nothing to indicate or acknowledge that our lives were complex, or that we had once loved each other, that we had laughed and quarreled, and raced naked to the water’s edge by moonlight, that we had rested and roused in each other’s arms, that we had played card games, and worked contentedly side by side, that we had been the warp and woof of each other’s lives. None of that.

  Finally I said, “I suppose you’ll go back to Paris now.”

  He ruminated before replying. “It was a good place, a fine place, like Jerrold said. But I’m not Jerrold Davies, and I’m not Jimmy Baldwin. My life, the work I’m meant to do, I need to be here.”

  I was so happy to hear these words. I wanted to reach out and take his hand and bring it to my lips. I downshifted instead; the cortege had slowed.

  “Got my old room on Naomi Avenue back, but not the garage. I don’t need a garage for the DeSoto. I’m driving Ruby’s old sedan. She has Clarence’s car now.”

  “I can’t imagine you in a DeSoto.”

  “Yeah, it’s certainly not an eagle. Not even a firefly like this MG. More like an old sow bug just rolling along the street. But it gets me to work.”

  “At the Challenger?”

  “I started there again last week.”

  “And your book?”

  “I wrote it, Roxanne. I didn’t finish it, and what I have is a mess, but I have enough to work with, to go on working.”

  “What’s it about?”

  He gave one of those rueful, almost unwilling laughs I so well remembered. “Truth is, I’m not real sure yet. Something to do with my daddy. I know that. My daddy and Moses Shaw.”

  “I saved all your letters from Alabama. You can have them back if you want. For your book,” I offered without looking at him.

  “Thanks. I probably won’t need them. I have all my own notes. I left them with Coralee when I went to Paris, and she saved them for me.”

  “I have your Royal,” I said, hoping that I could hold the typewriter hostage.

  “I have a new one. Keep it. Maybe you’ll finally learn how to type.”

  The cemetery gates loomed as the cars in front of us entered, and the MG idled in line. We did not look at each other. I longed for the gifts of a real Cyrano de Bergerac, to be able to speak deathless dialogue, or the gifts of an Ira Gershwin, immortal lyrics that would tell Terrence how much I loved him, how my life had emptied of joy, of meaning when he left me. Now he was back and I felt like Joan Fontaine when she returns to Thornfield and sees Orson Welles sitting alone on the bench and Bernard Herrmann’s music swells over them, but I had no music, no words, only the exhaust from other cars that soiled the air around us as the MG followed the cortege slowly winding along the road to Clarence’s final resting place. The sun bore down, and the heat needle wobbled up toward the red zone.

  “They’ll bury Clarence not too far from my mother and my grandparents,” Terrence mused, “and a lot of other family, Bowers and Prescotts, and Goodalls. I wonder if they’ll bury me here too. If all our lives just end up in the same place, and in the same way, no matter what or how much we try to do.”

  I swallowed a great wad of unwilling emotion, not trusting myself to speak, wishing that a huge deer would leap out of the headstones, fly over us, antlers and all, and that we would clutch at each other reflexively and rekindle the flame we had so carefully guarded from everyone who would have blown it out. I parked behind the big cars and turned off the motor.

  “Thanks. For the ride. Goodbye, Roxanne,” he said as he got out and folded the seat forward to protect the leather from the sun. He paused there, momentarily, before he turned and walked away. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  Oh god, I thought, my heart crawling up into my throat: This is it! Isn’t it? This is the airport scene! Can it be that the Church of Rick and Ilsa is a place without solace, with only the crumbs of strength you could sweep, hoard, muster, cling to so that you might endure the long, empty, loveless days and nights that would follow? Goodbye. Our paths will not cross, and we will never see each other again! Racketing through my whole body were emotions I had only ever seen onscreen, only ever felt secondhand, accompanied by popcorn. I used every ounce of strength I had to stifle anything remotely like a sob, or the temptation to call after him. Unsteadily I got out of the MG and walked toward the gravesite.

  Terrence joined the other pallbearers gathered at the hearse. Together they shouldered Clarence’s coffin, carried it to its final resting place, and lowered it to the ground in front of metal folding chairs lined up for the family. The chairs had gotten too hot to sit on, and men took off their suit jackets and placed them over the seats for buffers for the ladies.

  At Julia’s funeral, the few Negroes, badly outnumbered, had stood to one side. Here we few whites, badly outnumbered, stood apart, as though everyone had agreed to the custom that the races must be separate. Other than my own family, and the Wilkies, I didn’t know any of the other white people. I stood between Irene and Gordon, with Leon and Denise to my left. A hot breeze moved the veils on women’s hats and billowed out the preacher’s robes. From some distance came the sounds of traffic as the world went on its heedless way.

  Terrence stood behind his Aunt Ruby, looking across the grave to me. While the pastor spoke, Terrence’s line of vision never faltered from my face, and mine never left his. Leon followed his gaze, and he turned to give me a hard look, which I ignored. I stared at Terrence Dexter, at his beloved face that I might never see again. I called on every L’Oiseau d’Or principle, on every bit of panache that Julia had taught me; I feared I might tremble or faint from the heat. I could not, I must not cry, because if I started crying, I knew I’d never stop. I reminded myself over and over, I am Roxanne Granville, named for the heroine of a great play.

  When at long last this service ended, after the last “Amen,” people broke into groups to talk, to greet and commiserate, to pay respects to Ruby and the family, and to slowly leave the cemetery in little family clusters. The crowd thinned, but I stayed put, unmoving, while Leon and Denise and the others began to walk away, Irene and Gordon too. Sunlight poured molten all around me. I could not move for watching Terrence, who also stood rooted, ramrod straight, and pensive for what seemed forever, as though eons lay between us. Ruby rose and took her daughter’s arm. Terrence briefly kissed his aunt’s cheek and gave a whispered word to Coralee, and then, circling the grave, he crossed the distance between us, which had seemed immense, crossed it as though he were diminishing not just space, but time, until he stood in front of me.

  “The oubliette didn’t work for me,” he said in a voice that was clear and firm. “I went there to forget you, but I couldn’t. I tried. I tried everything there was, and I could not forget you.”

  “I tried too. I could not forget you. I’ve missed you so.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  “I never quit loving you.”

  “I never quit loving you, Roxanne, but we can’t do it like we did before. We have to be braver than that.”

  “I know.”

  “We have to be stronger. We have to be willing to let the world say what it wants, and just insist on loving each other, on being together.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you ready to do this? Here? Now?”

  “I am, Terrence. I’m ready.”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “I know that. I don’t care. I don’t want to live without you beside me. I don’t care what it costs, or who hates us, or what the world tries to do to us.”


  “They’ll try and destroy us. You know they will.”

  “They will try, but we won’t let them. We are stronger and better together than we are apart. Oh, Terrence, Julia always said, ‘The more strength you use, the more you will have.’ I believe that’s true.”

  “All right, then. We might as well take our stand here as anywhere.”

  “All right,” I said. “I do.”

  “I do too.”

  Terrence offered me his hand, and I took it. I felt his warmth penetrate not simply the flesh of my hand, but the very fiber of my being. I looked up into his dark eyes. A smile tugged at his lips, and his gold tooth gleamed. We did not kiss. We were at a funeral, after all. Everywhere around us I heard a collective intake of breath, of shock. Everyone, black and white, stared at us as though they had been turned to stone. Someone, Booker, I think, shouted, Don’t! Don’t do it! Don’t do it! I saw Leon go pale. I saw Denise’s red mouth gape with outrage. I saw Irene roll her eyes, smile at me, and shake her head, knowing this was the most romantic act of my life, but it was not reckless. Far from it. Terrence and I walked on by together, crossing both space and time toward a future that would challenge and reward us for the rest of our days.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In my family we take our movies seriously. Like Julia in The Great Pretenders, I took my eldest son to the movies when he did not weigh enough to hold down the seat. Bear sat through Gandhi—at age three. My youngest, Brendan, had seen The Bridge on the River Kwai three times before he was ten. They could sing all the songs from the Fred and Ginger movies, and they knew who wrote which tunes.

  Every weekend we had marathon movie night because with the first royalties from my novel These Latter Days, I bought a VCR. I remember walking the aisles of the video store after we had plugged it in. I was overwhelmed. Hundreds—maybe a thousand movies! Blockbusters, obscure foreign films, classics, silents, comedy, noir, some I had seen recently, some I had seen as a kid, some I had never even heard of. All of them were suddenly mine to behold for $2.99. My sons, who were just little boys then, were a few aisles away, and I could hear them quarreling over which movies we would take home. I let each of them choose one. For myself, I was so paralyzed by the possibilities I could only walk out with Gaslight (1944) with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, a movie I had long heard about but had never seen.