The Third Generation (38 page)

Dave was having an affair with a married woman named Cleo and introduced Charles to her younger sister, Peggy, so the four of them could ride around together. Peggy was a soft, voluptuous woman with reddish hair and fair skin, and she had that clinging, insistent femininity of women who want only to bear children. She was twenty-two years old and told Charles he was the second man she’d had. Cleo’s husband worked in a hotel garage and was away on weekends. Peggy lived with them.

During the afternoons while the husband was at work the four of them drove to nearby towns and rented rooms in various brothels. But on Sundays Dave drove off alone with Cleo while Charles and Peggy stayed at home. For Charles these were the best times. All day long they lay in each other’s arms. Peggy slept on the couch in the living room, but on these days they used her sister’s bed. The shades were drawn and they could hear the voices of the neighbors as they panted in delirium. For a time they’d lie lazily apart.

“Why don’t you want to marry me, baby?” she’d murmur in her soft southern accent.

“You know I do,” he’d lie.

They could hear the children laughing in the yard. It was cool and dim and pleasant in the secret room.

“Why do you always put it off then?”

“But we’re just getting to know each other.”

“What else you want to know? Ain’t it good to you?”

“Yes, yes.”

And she’d take him, enfold him in her soft hot body, so that he drowned in ecstasy. She seemed to respond the moment he touched her. Their mouths would be glued together, their tongues fused, their bodies thrashing in a struggle each to consume the other.

Once she screamed and bit his shoulder. Instantly he was flooding, overflowing, all of himself gushing into her.

By afternoon the sheet would be spotted with their love. They’d jump up guiltily arid run about the house, naked and laughing, while she washed the sheet, and she’d dress quickly and hang it on the line to catch the last sun. The neighbors watched her curiously, wondering why anyone would wash a single sheet on a late Sunday afternoon.

Finally his mother knew, not from any telltale evidence, but from something in his look. His tension had gone, he was relaxed but more implacable than ever. He didn’t fly into a rage when she scolded him for staying out so late. He scarcely paid any attention to her at all. She was overcome with a fierce, unreasonable jealousy.

“You just wait,” she screamed at him. “You’re going to end up in the penitentiary or on the gallows yet.”

She wanted to hurt him, to beat him unmercifully. She told herself it was to save him. Several times when he left home she tried to follow him. But when he got over on the next street he seemed to disappear. She didn’t know he simply got into his car and drove off. She thought the woman lived nearby. It was a white neighborhood. She was shocked. That he would take up with a white woman was unendurable. She couldn’t realize that she wanted to be the only white woman in his life. And she was certain the woman was mature.

Her fury became uncontrollable.

“Charles is living with a woman on the next street,” she told her husband, hoping to enrage him to action.

“Living?”

“He’s having an affair.”

He went over next day and found that only white people lived on that street. He was relieved.

“You’re going crazy,” he told his wife.

“You may think I’m crazy but I know what I’m talking about.”

He put down his paper. “Only white people live on that street.”

She couldn’t bring herself to say the woman was white.

“Why don’t you quit making up things to nag the boy? Let him alone, he’s coming out all right. He just needs some peace.”

She left the house; she couldn’t control herself. After that she nagged at Charles whenever he was home. She found herself incapable of charging to his face that he was living with a woman. Instead, she accused him of spending his time in dives and gambling dens. No matter what hour of night he returned home, she would arise and come into his room and turn on the light and stand in the door, her hair in braids and her face greasy with night cream, and nag until he turned his back and drew the covers over his head.

You’re throwing away your chances…you’re throwing away your chances
…The words would slither and crawl through the room like figments of insanity.

Then one day Peggy told him he’d have to marry her.

“You’ve made me pregnant, honey.”

They were returning from a drive, just the two of them, and had parked for a moment in front of her house. He had his arm about her and was leaning down to take her kiss. Abruptly he drew back.

“Pregnant?” He was frightened.

“You knew you were doing it, baby. The way you poured it into me.”

“It’s only been a couple of months.”

“How long you think it takes?”

To marry her was beyond his comprehension. It seemed impossible; impossible that she would even think he would. She didn’t know. He just couldn’t marry a common ordinary colored woman like herself. What would his mother think? She’d feel betrayed after all the things she’d told him about his white forebears. She’d really die, he thought.

It was the first time he’d been faced with such a choice. He knew, at that moment, he could never leave his mother.

“Well, let’s go inside and talk it over with your sister,” he said.

She got out. He reached over and closed the door and sped off, driving as if the demons were chasing him.

The next day Dave said, “Cleo and her husband been lookin’ for you. They asked me where you lived but I told ‘em I didn’t know.”

“Was Peggy with them?”

“Not at the time. What happened?”

“We broke off.”

“Is Peggy pregnant?”

“She says she is.”

Dave looked at him curiously. “That’s rough, kid.”

“Goddammit, she ought to have been more careful,” Charles flared defensively. “She knew I couldn’t marry her.”

“Well, you’d better be careful too, and hope they don’t find you.”

For several days he kept to himself, spending his afternoons at the movies, driving through the parks at night. He told himself he was glad to get out of it. But he couldn’t get over the realization that he’d done something horrible, despite how his mother might have felt. It kept coming back how he must have hurt her. She loved him. The strange part was he loved her too. It haunted him. It was the bitterest good-bye of them all.

His mother knew that it was ended. She could almost imagine how he had ended it. She suffered for him, and yet she was elated. She felt triumphant over the woman he must have hurt.

One day he ran into Dave downtown. He couldn’t keep from asking, “How’s Peggy?”

“You sent her back to Georgia, kid. You sent her home.”

After that he tightened up again. The demons were catching up. He began going out on the country roads, trying to lose himself in speed. But the demons ran along beside the car. Sometimes it was all he could do to keep from taking off from some high precipice and roaring toward the sky. He’d look up, and there’d be Peggy’s naked body straight across the road; or he’d find himself suddenly back in George’s house that night with Rose breaking up the party and the students fleeing out the door. He’d catch himself just in time to keep from running into something. It was as if the current of his life, having passed its crest, was now running downhill. It was swifter, more dangerous, infinitely more destructive as it gained in momentum. It became dangerous for him to drive alone.

Danger and the loneliness drove him back to town. He began picking up women from the street, taking them to liquor joints, waking up in strange rooms with half-remembered details of drunken orgies. Often he was utterly shocked by the memory of a scene.

There was a popular cabaret in the downtown colored district where he often went. It had a bar that sold setups for the drinks sold by the bootleggers hustling at the tables, and a bandstand at the end of a big dance floor. On weekend nights the place was crowded with women on the make. Charles smoked cork-tipped cigarettes and wore his white linen suit and black crepe silk shirt and the floating, seeking women began picking him up. When the trumpet player came forward and began blowing the
Bugle Blues
the women became wild and abandoned, were caught in a hypnotic exhibitionism. Some tried to take off their clothes, screaming, “Let me run naked!” while husbands and lovers struggled to restrain them. Others stood atop the tables with their dresses pulled above their waists and screamed, “Blow it out, daddy, blow it out!” During these moments some predaceous woman or another always captured Charles, throwing her arms about his neck and devouring him with her whore’s look, crooning in her whiskey voice, “Give me those eyes.” He’d go home with whatever one approached him first; sometimes with women who paid the bills, sometimes with those who thought themselves queens, sometimes with others, atrociously ugly, who made up for it by mothering him. Several times he went home with a prizefighter’s wife who’d tremble stagily whenever she saw him. The men never bothered Charles; they called him “Pigmeat” and joshed him about his conquests. Only the older women were infatuated, the young girls were hunting older men. And always, sooner or later, as he lay in bed with them, the expression came up, “With eyes like those you can break any whore’s heart.”

One night he spoke to the trumpet player who was standing at the bar between two teen-age girls.

“How do you do it, Pat?”

The dark man in his ice cream suit with his glossy hair gave him a confidential grin. “Keep ‘em barefooted and knocked up.”

Charles returned the grin. A woman came and took his arm.

“You the one got the best go and the mojo,” Pat called after him.

He became friendly with Pat after that and met the others in the band. Frequently when the place closed he would drive them home, or to some after-hours spot where they met their women.

When their contract was up at the cabaret the band went on the road. Charles began driving them about the state to the steel-mill towns where they played one-night stands in the local dance halls. Those nights were caught in fantasy. A dreamlike quality descended on the violent dances in the strange, distant cities, the wild abandoned rhythms animating the black figures milling about the floor in the dim light until reason seemed to have fled the mad orgiastic weaving of their bodies. Then followed the bloody cuttings, the grotesquely funny shootings in the underbrush, a “brass-lined forty-four on a forty-five frame” blazing in the night, some poor victim dancing an agony of death. And afterwards the mad drive homeward, racing blindly through the early morning fog, riding the sound of the motor roar, like something out of the
Inferno
; the band boys half drunk and dead tired, draped about each other, another car or two following, and himself crouched over the wheel, foot jammed to the floor, feeling invincible, as if he could drive his goddamned car right straight down through the solid goddamned earth, daring death. Most times he couldn’t see a curve thirty feet ahead.

“Jesus Christ, kid, take it easy,” some band boy would say, suddenly awakening as the car lurched from disaster.

“Have we ever had an accident?” he’d challenge.

“No, but goddammit, the way you driving we ain’t gonna have but one.”

“Do I charge you anything to use my car?”

“What the hell’s that got to do with it if we all wake up dead?”

“Listen—” shouting over the roar. “All I ask you to do is close your eyes. I’ll get you home.”

Those times he’d completely escaped all his hurt and loneliness.

His mother kept after him constantly to study for his examinations that fall. But nights he was always gone, coming home drunk to sleep away the day. She didn’t know where he went or what he did. She feared any day they’d bring him home dead, or that she’d be notified he was in jail for some terrible crime. He couldn’t tell her that the sight of his textbooks nauseated him, that demons pursued him, that once he’d dreamed horribly of letting her die—that the only way he could escape these things was by his nighttime odysseys. She began to fear that he didn’t intend to return to college. She felt his life would be irrevocably destroyed unless he did.

In her desperation she tried to get control of his compensation but was told it required a court order. She tried to engage an attorney to file an action. He told her the concurrence of both parents was necessary. But her husband wouldn’t support her.

“For God’s sake, let the boy alone,” he said. “He’s coming out of it. If you keep pushing him and nagging at him you’ll run him away from home like you did Tom.”

She closed her mouth in a grim, hard line. They hadn’t heard from Tom in more than a year. It was a source of hurt. But she could never bring herself to admit she had run him away.

“I’ll not sit by and see him throw away his life,” she said.

So she went to the hotel and demanded that they give her his monthly pension so she could save it for him.

The manager sent for Charles and told him of his mother’s visit. “If you wish we’ll be glad to mail your checks to her,” he said. “But we won’t do it unless you consent.”

“No, I don’t want her to have them. I’ll call for them after this.”

When his mother learned of his decision, she threatened to have the courts force them to give her his pension. She and the manager had an awful row.

“You’ve cheated him out of a settlement,” she accused, “and now you’re trying to ruin his life.”

“Rather than do that,” the manager said angrily, “we’ll stop it entirely.”

Charles never learned exactly what happened. When he called for his check the first of that month the cashier told him that his pension had been discontinued. For a moment he debated whether to see Mr. Small, then decided against it. He didn’t know what his mother had done but he dreaded becoming involved; he’d rather not have it than be caught up in a long, bitter quarrel.

Later he overheard her quarreling with his father. “I’d rather he didn’t have it,” he heard her say, “than throw it away running around with God only knows what kind of people and getting himself into all kind of trouble.”