A Summer of Kings (3 page)

He turned around when he heard me come in, and the first thing that struck me was that he looked so bright and handsome—not movie-star handsome but still quite handsome. His skin was a pretty copper color, and his face was so smooth-looking I thought maybe he hadn't started shaving yet. He was tall and slender, maybe six feet tall, and he had a nice broad forehead and large, soft brown eyes and a nose that kind of spread out across his face a bit too much and a pretty mouth, full and well shaped. Altogether his face looked gentle and quiet like a pond in the still of the day. He wore his hair cut close to his head, and he had on horn-rimmed glasses that made him look smart. Seeing him, King-Roy Johnson, standing before me, looking every bit like my fantasy of him, made me want to giggle. I felt relief or joy or something rising up in my chest, and I turned away. I wanted to leave, to run get Auntie Pie so I could hide behind her and think about my feelings more, but King-Roy Johnson called me back.

"Hey," he said. "I'm King-Roy Johnson; who are you?"

I turned back around and stepped forward and held out my hand for him to shake. I said, "I'm Esther. I'm Esther Young, and this—this is my house."

King-Roy smiled this easy kind of smile, not forced, and shook my hand. "Pleased to meet you, Miz Esther."

I waved my hand and blushed. "Oh, you can just call me Esther."

"Nice," King-Roy said, and I didn't know what was nice—my name or that he could just call me Esther without the
Miss.

King-Roy crossed his arms in front of him and looked first to one side of him, then to the other. He said, "Is this apartments or a hotel or what?"

"It's my parents' house."

He shook his head. "It can't be just one house, can it?"

King-Roy's voice sounded smooth like drinking a thick chocolate shake. It was soft and southern—real mellow, like his face. He was all-over mellow. I had never had a fantasy of mine come true, not even a little bit of one, but here was this King-Roy, so handsome and perfect I didn't know what to do. I wanted him to think I was smart and beautiful and glamorous, because that was the other part of my fantasy.

I said, "Lots of people think our house is the college. There's one just down the road. The same architect built both the college and our house, so they look a lot alike—both Tudor style. It's just down the road—the college is." I realized I sounded like a dope, but I couldn't help myself.

"We get new college kids coming here all the time who just walk into the house thinking they've arrived at the college. I guess that's what you did? Just walked in thinking it was a hotel?" I laughed at this, using a practiced Katharine Hepburn kind of laugh, a toss-it-over-your shoulders kind of laugh, and Mr. King-Roy Johnson gave me his easy smile again but didn't answer my question.

I returned his smile, but I felt stupid for laughing the way I did. I could feel its phoniness echoing in my ears. When I had practiced it in my room, imagining our first meeting, with me in one of Beatrice's frilly dresses, it had sounded much better.

"So just one family lives here?" He turned around with his arms held out, taking in the whole of our ballroom.

I looked around. The room was huge, and it was rectangular, with a highly polished wooden floor and rows of leaded, diamond-patterned windows with stained-glass panels at the top. It was, in my mind, a very English ballroom—the kind used in the evening after a day of fox hunting. One set of windows overlooked a stone porch that ran the length of the east wing of the house, and beyond that were the lily pool, rose garden, and pavilion.

"Just one family and a few guests," I said, nodding. "My parents like having company, so you're very welcome here," I said, thinking Mother would be pleased that I said this.

"Nice," King-Roy Johnson said.

I took a step toward him and said, "My mother and your mother were best friends, so ... so of course you're welcome."

"That's right, uh-huh, best friends," King-Roy said, his eyes scanning the stained-glass scenes of Viking ships again. He looked back at me. "So, how many rooms does this place have, anyway?"

"Thirty," I said. "Our library is just beyond those doors over there," I added, pointing to both sides of the fireplace. I shrugged, acting as if the house wasn't so grand, even though I knew it was.

"Thirty rooms!" King-Roy Johnson said, shaking his head and peering into the library. "And I bet every one of 'em's as big as most people's whole house." He turned to look at me, then said, "Just between you and me, I'm not so sure how comfortable I'm gon' be staying here."

"Oh it's plenty comfortable here," I said, not really sure what he meant. Then, to demonstrate, I suppose, what a comfortable, easygoing, fun place our house was, I kicked off my Keds and ran over to one of the window seats. My sister and brother each kept a pair of socks on the seat. I put my brother's pair on and then said to King-Roy Johnson, "Watch this." I pushed off from the window seat and skated across the floor. When I was just about to come to a stop, I fell onto my chest and slid some more on my stomach, with my arms spread out like wings on either side of me. I came to a stop in front of the fireplace.

King-Roy laughed an amused kind of laugh, and I couldn't tell if he enjoyed it or he thought I had just done the stupidest thing in the world.

I stood up, feeling pains in my breasts where I had landed too hard on the floor. I felt my face flood with heat and embarrassment again. This wasn't the way I had imagined myself behaving at all.

I tried to laugh it off with another Katharine Hepburn laugh, then said, "I'm really much too old for that. I'm almost fifteen. Way too old. I don't do floor skating anymore, but Stewart and Sophia still enjoy it. They're my brother and sister. Stewart's ten and Sophia's six going on thirty, as my mother likes to say. They're both really smart, and talented. They're brilliant, really. Mother's had their IQs tested."

"Is that right?" King-Roy Johnson said, his face going quiet again. "So are you brilliant, too?"

I looked out the windows that faced the front yard, where my favorite rock, a giant slab of white granite in the shape of a polar bear, poked out of the earth. The polar bear had been a sort of friend when I was little, an imaginary, rock friend, and I looked to it for comfort before turning back to King-Roy Johnson and answering him. "Well," I said, "Mother says we're all smart, but that's just Mother. She doesn't want to hurt my feelings." I went over to the window seat and pulled off the socks.

King-Roy Johnson walked across the floor, and I noticed his shoes had a good
tap-tap
sound to them. He stopped in front of me, with his arms crossed.

I looked up at him, and he had this gentle, angellike smile, and he said, "You ever think maybe she's telling the truth?"

"Oh, no," I said, looking up into his face and seeing my own round-faced reflection in his eyeglasses. "Not a chance. She never even bothered to have my intelligence tested like she did with Sophia and Stewart. I stayed back in school when I was in the third grade. That was before I got my eyes fixed. I used to have lots of trouble with reading because I was cross-eyed. No, I have no talents or anything." I sat on the window seat, leaning forward and looking down at the floor with my hands tucked under my thighs. I felt uncomfortable talking to a perfect stranger, a murderer, an eighteen-year-old black boy, about my eyes and staying back and all that. When I had imagined our first conversation together, I thought he would be telling me how mature I seemed for my age, how wise, but after my stint on the ballroom floor, that conversation was down the toilet and instead I was exposing my most tender, most sore, spot. I never talked about my staying back a year in school, not even at home—especially not at home.

King-Roy Johnson shook his head and said, "Shoot, anyone could have crossed eyes and still be smart, even if they were held back a year."

I looked down at my feet and noticed they looked sweaty and swollen. I brought my legs up and sat cross-legged on the window seat so he wouldn't notice. "I read really well, now, at least," I said. "I love to read." I looked up. "Do you love to read, King-Roy?"

"Well, I do now," he said, sitting down next to me and stretching his long legs out in front of him. "But I came late to reading. My brothers and sisters learned early when they were in the first or second grade, but it took me a long time. A real long time. I didn't even start speaking until I was ten years old."

"Did everybody think you were stupid?"

King-Roy said, "Yessum, there were plenty who thought I had no brains in my head, but my momma knew differently. She told all the teachers that she knew in her heart that I was smart and that when I got ready to talk and to read, why, I'd do it, and meanwhile she would read to me and talk to me like I was the smartest boy in town. And she was right. I turned ten, and a few weeks later I was talking up a blue streak and nobody could shut me up. Then I decided I might as well start reading, and sure enough, I could read just fine once I set my mind to it." King-Roy nodded to himself and looked across the room at the fireplace as though it were something different, someplace different. Then he said, "It was my momma having confidence and having faith in me that brought me around to talking and reading."

"Well," I said, "she sure had to wait an awfully long time before you proved her right."

King-Roy nodded. "She had the faith," he said. "I owe her plenty. That's why I'm here, here with y'all. I'm here for my momma. She's always been on my side. She's the only one who believed me when I said I didn't kill anybody. She told me to come here, so here I am."

King-Roy's eyes blinked fast several times, and he turned his head to look out the windows, way off toward the pavilion, still blinking, and I thought he was one of the luckiest people on Earth to have a mother like that. I knew my mother loved me. She had to. But if someone had accused me of killing a man, she would believe him. Maybe she would think I did it by mistake, but still, she'd feel sure that I did it. Everyone in the family, the whole household, would believe I did it. I didn't have anybody, besides Pip, really rooting for me. Everybody was too busy rooting for Sophia and Stewart. They were the stars of the family. Thinking about this made me feel ashamed for what I had said to Pip that afternoon. I didn't tell King-Roy any of this, of course. Instead I said, "Do you know what my sister, Sophia, did last week?"

King-Roy turned back to me and shook his head. "No. What did she do?"

"She drew an aerial view of Central Park on her Etch A Sketch, or 'L'Ecran Magique,' as Monsieur Vichy calls it. Six years old and she's only flown over Central Park once in a helicopter, and she put that on an Etch A Sketch. It's a toy and I can barely draw a circle with one of those things. I'm always turning the wrong knob the wrong way. My father got a book out of the town library to compare her drawing with a photograph of Central Park by air, and her drawing matched it exactly." I looked up at King-Roy. "Now, how do you compete with that?"

"You don't have to compete. You're your own person with your own kind of smarts." King-Roy crossed his legs and pushed his glasses back up on his nose. He did this slowly, carefully, as if he thought the glasses might ram into his eyes if he pushed them too fast. I had never seen anyone adjust his glasses with such care before.

"Now, you take me for instance," he said, bringing me back to our discussion. "I read all the time now, but I can't claim that most of my learning comes from books. A lot of it comes from just watching and living and dealing with what comes my way, and somebody coming up to me and telling me how smart she is with an Etcher Sketch doesn't mean much to me. I'm not so impressed." He stood up and turned to face me and said, "Now, I bet someone like you has got natural smarts. You're easy to talk to, and that takes a natural kind of smarts."

"Really?"

He nodded. "Sure 'nuff. You've made me feel right at home."

"I have?" I asked, standing up and facing him.

King-Roy nodded and looked around the ballroom again. "Coming to a place like this, so big, like a castle or something, well, it feels real strange. It's so grand, it makes me feel like I'm supposed to do something important coming here, or say something real clever, but you make me feel like it's gon' be all right."

King-Roy smiled this warm melt-your-heart kind of smile and I felt my knees go weak. He liked me.

I smiled back at King-Roy and decided that I liked him, too. Maybe I really
could
fall in love with him, and maybe when Laura and Kathy got back from their vacation and saw me walking hand in hand with Mr. Tall-dark-and-handsome, they'd see that I was more mature than the two of them any day.

I hesitated a second, then took King-Roy's hand. "Come on, let me show you the rest of the house. Let me show you your rooms. I fixed them up myself. I even put flowers in your bedroom even though you're a boy—or a man, I mean. Oh, and wait till you see my bedroom. Beatrice—that's Beatrice Bonham, the actress—she's staying with us and she's so jealous of my room it makes
her
cross-eyed."

King-Roy laughed and it sounded like a donkey braying, and that made me laugh, too. It made me want to tell him more. It made me want to tell him everything about my life.

Together we walked back through the solarium and the living room until we came out into the foyer, where we found Auntie Pie standing there. She stood right in the center of the foyer, right in the center of Mother's good jewel-toned Oriental rug. She stood right there, waiting for us—waiting for us with a gun in her hand, aimed right at the two of us.

"Esther, get out of the way," Auntie Pie said, using the gun to gesture with.

The gun looked like a gunslinger's revolver and weighed heavy in her hands. She could barely hold it up straight.

Both King-Roy and I stood right where we were.

"What are you doing?" I asked. "Where did you get that gun? Are you crazy?"

"That's my gun," King-Roy said, his nostrils flaring. "You took that out of my suitcase, yonder." He pointed through the open front door at his straw-colored suitcase. "I don't appreciate that. No, ma'am, I don't appreciate that one bit."