Five Smooth Stones (140 page)

"Maybe," she murmured to herself, "if I could get closer to the stove—" then smiled at her own irrelevance because she knew there must be thousands, perhaps millions, of pregnant women just about at term, all over the country who could, at any given moment, whip up a decent panful of scrambled eggs.

In a minute she would have to call David if he didn't show up because he hated to hurry through breakfast. "You spoil the big ape," Brad had said. "So I spoil him," she had answered. "Some people gamble, some people drink, some people sniff glue. I spoil David. What else can you do with a character like that? It's compulsive."

She was glad now that Brad and Peg had urged them to wait before buying a place, because they had just learned that a family who lived near the Willises was moving sometime within a year, and they had taken an option on the house. Renting for the interim period hadn't been easy. Plenty of people were willing to sell; few were willing to rent to a mixed couple. She walked away from these places, cheeks flaming with anger, beside a calm and philosophical David. "I hate it for you," he said once. "I suppose I can take it because I can remember the time—and plenty of places—when I wouldn't have been stupid enough even to ask."

The apartment they finally found was in a neighborhood in transit from white to colored. In size and arrangement it was more nearly ideal than they had dared anticipate. There were a large living room, a dining room, bedroom, kitchen with breakfast nook, and a bath. They bought a bed-divan for the living room so they could put up Chuck or Luke or anyone else they wanted, and settled in while Sara, wondering if such happiness was quite decent, simultaneously searched for and found a studio.

She savored these memories now, in present happiness, remembering the years of loneliness and alienation with a sort of shrinking wonderment that she had survived to grasp and make whole the life that had been restored to her that afternoon in David's hospital room. It had been such a damned silly afternoon of little words and little phrases, of laughing and being told by David not to make him laugh, of saying finally: "Fifteen minutes, David. I have to go; they'll make me. Do you want—you—David, you won't send me away? I'll come tomorrow?" And he hadn't heard her. "Don't be late tomorrow, Smallest. Don't—" and as she was going out the door, he had called, "Sara! Sara! Wait! there's a hotel near here. Much, much nearer. Chuck stays there. After a while they'll let you come morning and afternoon and night. I'll make them—"

That same night she had called Chuck Martin and asked, "How did you know, way back there in college, Who it is that runs things?"

A voice said, "Don't beat those eggs to death, hon," and she turned as quickly as her ungainliness would permit and made a face at the man in the doorway.

"Hi, sweet."

He stood tall, still thin, leaning on a cane, bones showing in his face that had not shown years before, eyes clear and smiling. The open neck of the green robe showed the wide, deep chest, the strong symmetry of the dark throat where it sloped to the shoulders.

"Hi, Smallest."

"Smallest, my foot! Not Smallest now. Maybe next week."

He limped over to her, his cane thudding on the floor, and put his arm around her. "It better be sooner than that."

She rose on her toes and kissed him gently, pulling his head down to her lips, one hand soft and still on his cheek. "We're in dreadful shape, aren't we? You can't bend your back far enough over yet to kiss me, and I can't get close enough to you to kiss you properly because of the baby."

He laughed. "We seem to be doing all right. Want me to take over on the eggs?"

"Gosh, yes. Please. Just so they'll be the way you like 'em-"

Usually when they ate in the breakfast nook, David sat with his back against the wall window, the leg with the injured knee stretched out along the bench. Today he sat facing her squarely, the leg, knee slightly bent, extended along the floor beside the table. He looked at the knee, wagged the leg, and said, "It bendeth."

"It will bendeth more after Moore has another go at it. Sudsy says."

"One more river to cross. Only let's not even talk about it, huh? Let's wait till we get over this baby-having deal."

"Till you get over it, you mean."

"All right. Till I get over it, pet." Toast popped up in the toaster beside him, and he took a piece. A sound brought his eyes to the chair at the end of the table, and he saw two small black, pink-lined ears and two round yellow eyes just clearing the table's edge.

"Sara."

"Don't be a meanie."

"Sara, I know I've always been a damned fool about that cat. But I never, I swear I never let him sit at the table."

"Don't blame Chop-bone. And don't make him get down. He won't be top dog—top cat—much longer." She took a small scrap of bacon and laid it near the edge of the table and grinned delightedly when a white-tipped black paw snaked out, speared it, and brought it to a pink and dainty mouth.

"Do you suppose our son will be that smart? Relatively speaking, of course," she asked.

When David did not respond she said, "David, you're not going to mind terribly, are you, I mean really mind, if we have a boy?"

He broke off a small piece of toast, buttered it with careful deliberation, his eyes on the knife, the butter, the toast, miles from Sara.

"David."

He did not look up. "I'm not going to 'really mind,' as you put it, anything if you'll just hurry up and have the baby so I can stop worrying."

"That's not an answer. And I've told you and Suds has told you and Dr. Frye has told you I'm going to be all right."

"What the hell do they know about it?"

"A fair amount, I'd say. Anyhow, look at Peg. Ten years older than I am."

"And twice your size. Besides, she had a Cesarean."

"So will I if anything goes haywire. It won't. David, I think it's going to be a boy. And so does Dr. Frye."

"He's only guessing. Only person I ever knew who could tell beforehand was an old, old lady in the French Quarter. Black as jet, and folks said she practiced voodoo. She was never known to miss...." He broke off another piece of toast, began the slow buttering process again. "She's dead now."

Some women, thought Sara, some women would throw that specially softened butter right smack in his face. And win custody of the child, the cat, and both bank accounts. She drew a deep breath and said, "You mustn't, David; you simply must not mind having a baby, me having a baby, and it's being a boy."

He looked at her now and saw a troubled, anxious face.

"Sweet, let's not go all through it again, huh? There sure as hell isn't anything we can do about it. I know when I'm licked. I even gave in on naming him David. Let's just concentrate on bringing the baby into a world that doesn't, particularly want him—or her."

"David. It's not—" She stopped, started to resume speaking twice before she finally managed. "We're in one of those 'areas' again, aren't we? The kind you've talked about. Your area and my area and never the twain and stuff."

"I'm afraid we are."

She remembered their past discussion of the subject, sitting where they were sitting now, late at night, drinking beer, eating cheese and crackers. She wasn't even sure about her pregnancy that time, only hopeful. And she was more than hopeful that David, once he thought they were going to have a baby, would change his stubborn attitude of "no children, for God's sake." His reaction to the news of her possible pregnancy had been the most jolting hurt of her marriage.

"No!" he said. "Go see Suds or an obstetrician or someone tomorrow. You could be mistaken. Lots of times—"

"I've already made an appointment." She was almost whispering. "I made it today. David, I was so happy about it." She sat upright suddenly, stiff and straight and defiant. "And if it's true, David, I'm not going to do anything about it. Not for you or for anything in the world. So don't even mention it."

"I know better than to do that." He smiled across the table at her, and she could tell he was trying to soothe the hurt. "I'll just put in an order for a girl."

"Girl? I've already spoken for a boy. Most men—"

"Sara, love, I've told you this before. I don't want a baby, any kind of baby, because it's too damned rough on any human who has to go through life living in two worlds. It's rough to have one white parent and be called a nigger. It's rough to have two black parents and be called a nigger, but of the two, I'll take two black parents and the word 'nigger' and know pride in my skin. It takes a lot of doing, Sara, for two people to instill pride of race into a child half white, half black. I was born black, lived black, but on my mother's side I must have had white ancestors. You think I'm proud of it? Christ no! Remember Jedediah? There's a proud man. Real pride, I'm talking about. The right kind of pride."

He had gotten up and gone to the refrigerator for more beer. His limp was more pronounced then, and she knew the leg was often painful, but the doctor had said, "Don't try to spare him moderate walking, Mrs. Champlin," and she held herself back from the quick jump to bring him what he wanted, to push things closer to him, her own inner pain greater than his outer pain.

When he came back to the table he said, "I happen to believe that the mixed-race girl has a little better chance. Let's say a less lousy chance."

He poured beer, then smiled at her over the glass, and she knew he was trying to change the course of their talk. "Besides, if this baby we don't know whether we're producing or not is a girl, it might look like you."

"David, if he's a boy—and don't call a baby 'it'—I want him to look like you. Only it doesn't work that way usually. Daughters look like fathers, sons like mothers."

"My God, a midget!"

Sara knew she was being stubborn and female but refused to be diverted. "You've got so much, David, so damned much to offer a son—"

Only when they were in what he'd called "those areas" did David explode with a change of mood so sudden it frightened her. It was as though a word, a phrase not thought out beforehand, acted on the stored memories in his mind like a torch to dynamite.

"What? For Christ's sake, what! A heritage of horror, that's what. One ancestor burned alive, his son dying of fright on a city street when he was an old man, that man's son killed hopping a freight trying to make a living for his family in a white man's world, and his own father missing death from lynching by minutes, permanently crippled. I'll offer him a Champlin coat of arms, I'll draw it—a noose, symbolizing his people; a bonfire, crossed rifles, and a wolf dog rampant."

"David. Don't! You've never talked quite this way before."

"Maybe I've never faced being a parent before."

"But David, that's downright silly. That's not pride of race. It's not what happened to them that's important. It's what they were. Good, fine men, every one of them. You've always said so. And I can speak for Gramp. David, wouldn't you rather point to a dozen ancestors who were lynched than one —just one—who'd taken part in a lynching? Wouldn't you?"

"Of course I would! Of course I would! But how can a man explain that to his son when the kid hears himself called 'nigger' for the first time—a kid who's only half nigger at that? What does he say? Does he say: 'Listen, son, don't let it upset you. Your old man's folks were O.K., they were black. But your mother's folks were stinkers, they were white, and they hung and burned and shot and castrated and enslaved and oppressed your old man's people for two hundred years.' And they'll still be doing it! Even while you're talking to the poor little tyke, they'll still be doing it!"

And I can't do anything about it, she thought; no one can do anything about those deep and hidden areas of stored-up agony and humiliation; no one, no one, no matter how much they love. If only I could bear this baby secretly, without having it show, have it suddenly, not let him know until it is alive and his—and mine. He'd love it, oh, most surely he must love his own as he did other children.

She said, "Billy. You know, the little boy in New Orleans you told me about—"

"He'd already been born! He was already here and in the world, and of it—"

"And fighting. Isaiah told us when he was here that he's the youngest member of ALEC, that he gives a nickel a week to ALEC, out of what little he has. Do you think if you had a son he'd just sit back and feel sorry for himself, let himself be licked? Not David Champlin's son."

It ended then, with David behind the wall she could never stretch tall enough to peer over, even his voice different when it came from the other side of that battlement. "Maybe," he said lightly, "I'd rather a girl because I like girls best—" and she had remained silent because of the bitter knowledge that now, at this moment, when a man and a woman should be closest, she and David were two different lifetimes apart.

They had not discussed it again during the nine months just past, David's shrinking from the fact of the child apparently swallowed up in his inordinate worry about her. She told Peg, "Honestly, there's not a single thing that can go wrong with a pregnancy or delivery that he doesn't wake up in the night worrying about."

"As long as you don't do that, it'll be a breeze—"

"I don't care if it's a breeze or a hurricane, Peg. I just can't seem to be anything but brainless and happy about the whole thing—"

Now, in what might be only a matter of days or even hours before the child was born that he had said he didn't want, she drew back from getting any deeper into one of the "areas" that held pain for them both.

She refilled their cups, sugared David's generously, and held her own in both hands, looking at him over its rim.

"You know when this baby was conceived, David? I mean, really conceived?"

He grinned at her. "We could turn the problem over to a computer—"

"Please. I'm serious, David. I hoped you'd know, but I imagine it's one of those only-female things. And maybe you won't even understand. It was a long time ago. It was on a spring night in Laurel, Ohio, when a kid named David Champlin came to a door and a girl with her arm in a green silk sling opened it and loved him like hell from then on in. That's when it was."