You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (15 page)

As a matter of fact, Lucy, it occurs to me that we might plan another ball in the spring as a benefit for this new resistance. What do you think? Do let us get together to discuss it, during the week.

Your friend,

Susan Marie

A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring

For the Wellesley Class

S
ARAH WALKED SLOWLY
off the tennis court, fingering the back of her head, feeling the sturdy dark hair that grew there. She was popular. As she walked along the path toward Talfinger Hall her friends fell into place around her. They formed a warm jostling group of six. Sarah, because she was taller than the rest, saw the messenger first.

“Miss Davis,” he said, standing still until the group came abreast of him, “I’ve got a telegram for ye.” Brian was Irish and always quite respectful. He stood with his cap in his hand until Sarah took the telegram. Then he gave a nod that included all the young ladies before he turned away. He was young and good-looking, though annoyingly servile, and Sarah’s friends twittered.

“Well, open it!” someone cried, for Sarah stood staring at the yellow envelope, turning it over and over in her hand.

“Look at her,” said one of the girls, “isn’t she beautiful! Such eyes, and hair, and
skin
!”

Sarah’s tall, caplike hair framed a face of soft brown angles, high cheekbones and large dark eyes. Her eyes enchanted her friends because they always seemed to know more, and to find more of life amusing, or sad, than Sarah cared to tell.

Her friends often teased Sarah about her beauty; they loved dragging her out of her room so that their boyfriends, naive and worldly young men from Princeton and Yale, could see her. They never guessed she found this distasteful. She was gentle with her friends, and her outrage at their tactlessness did not show. She was most often inclined to pity them, though embarrassment sometimes drove her to fraudulent expressions. Now she smiled and raised eyes and arms to heaven. She acknowledged their unearned curiosity as a mother endures the prying impatience of a child. Her friends beamed love and envy upon her as she tore open the telegram.

“He’s dead,” she said.

Her friends reached out for the telegram, their eyes on Sarah.

“It’s her father,” one of them said softly. “He died yesterday. Oh, Sarah,” the girl whimpered, “I’m so sorry!”

“Me too.” “So am I.” “Is there anything we can do?”

But Sarah had walked away, head high and neck stiff.

“So graceful!” one of her friends said.

“Like a proud gazelle” said another. Then they all trooped to their dormitories to change for supper.

Talfinger Hall was a pleasant dorm. The common room just off the entrance had been made into a small modern art gallery with some very good original paintings, lithographs and collages. Pieces were constantly being stolen. Some of the girls could not resist an honest-to-God Chagall, signed (in the plate) by his own hand, though they could have afforded to purchase one from the gallery in town. Sarah Davis’s room was next door to the gallery, but her walls were covered with inexpensive Gauguin reproductions, a Rubens (“The Head of a Negro”), a Modigliani and a Picasso. There was a full wall of her own drawings, all of black women. She found black men impossible to draw or to paint; she could not bear to trace defeat onto blank pages. Her women figures were matronly, massive of arm, with a weary victory showing in their eyes. Surrounded by Sarah’s drawings was a red SNCC poster of a man holding a small girl whose face nestled in his shoulder. Sarah often felt she was the little girl whose face no one could see.

To leave Talfinger even for a few days filled Sarah with fear. Talfinger was her home now; it suited her better than any home she’d ever known. Perhaps she loved it because in winter there was a fragrant fireplace and snow outside her window. When hadn’t she dreamed of fireplaces that really warmed, snow that almost pleasantly froze? Georgia seemed far away as she packed; she did not want to leave New York, where, her grandfather had liked to say, “the devil hung out and caught young gals by the front of their dresses.” He had always believed the South the best place to live on earth (never mind that certain people invariably marred the landscape), and swore he expected to die no more than a few miles from where he had been born. There was tenacity even in the gray frame house he lived in, and in scrawny animals on his farm who regularly reproduced. He was the first person Sarah wanted to see when she got home.

There was a knock on the door of the adjoining bathroom, and Sarah’s suite mate entered, a loud Bach concerto just finishing behind her. At first she stuck just her head into the room, but seeing Sarah fully dressed she trudged in and plopped down on the bed. She was a heavy blonde girl with large milk-white legs. Her eyes were small and her neck usually gray with grime.

“My, don’t you look gorgeous,” she said.

“Ah, Pam,” said Sarah, waving her hand in disgust. In Georgia she knew that even to Pam she would be just another ordinarily attractive
colored
girl. In Georgia there were a million girls better looking. Pam wouldn’t know that, of course; she’d never been to Georgia; she’d never even seen a black person to speak to, that is, before she met Sarah. One of her first poetic observations about Sarah was that she was “a poppy in a field of winter roses.” She had found it weird that Sarah did not own more than one coat.

“Say listen, Sarah,” said Pam, “I heard about your father. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Thanks,” said Sarah.

“Is there anything we can do? I thought, well, maybe you’d want my father to get somebody to fly you down. He’d go himself but he’s taking Mother to Madeira this week. You wouldn’t have to worry about trains and things.”

Pamela’s father was one of the richest men in the world, though no one ever mentioned it. Pam only alluded to it at times of crisis, when a friend might benefit from the use of a private plane, train, or ship; or, if someone wanted to study the characteristics of a totally secluded village, island or mountain, she might offer one of theirs. Sarah could not comprehend such wealth, and was always annoyed because Pam didn’t look more like a billionaire’s daughter. A billionaire’s daughter, Sarah thought, should really be less horsey and brush her teeth more often.

“Gonna tell me what you’re brooding about?” asked Pam.

Sarah stood in front of the radiator, her fingers resting on the window seat. Down below girls were coming up the hill from supper.

“I’m thinking,” she said, “of the child’s duty to his parents after they are dead.”

“Is that all?”

“Do you know,” asked Sarah, “about Richard Wright and his father?”

Pamela frowned. Sarah looked down at her.

“Oh, I forgot,” she said with a sigh, “they don’t teach Wright here. The poshest school in the U.S., and the girls come out ignorant.” She looked at her watch, saw she had twenty minutes before her train. “Really,” she said almost inaudibly, “why Tears Eliot, Ezratic Pound, and even Sara Teacake, and no Wright?” She and Pamela thought e.e. cummings very clever with his perceptive spelling of great literary names.

“Is he a poet then?” asked Pam. She adored poetry, all poetry. Half of America’s poetry she had, of course, not read, for the simple reason that she had never heard of it.

“No,” said Sarah, “he wasn’t a poet.” She felt weary. “He was a man who wrote, a man who had trouble with his father.” She began to walk about the room, and came to stand below the picture of the old man and the little girl.

“When he was a child,” she continued, “his father ran off with another woman, and one day when Richard and his mother went to ask him for money to buy food he laughingly rejected them. Richard, being very young, thought his father Godlike. Big, omnipotent, unpredictable, undependable and cruel. Entirely in control of his universe. Just like a god. But, many years later, after Wright had become a famous writer, he went down to Mississippi to visit his father. He found, instead of God, just an old watery-eyed field hand, bent from plowing, his teeth gone, smelling of manure. Richard realized that the most daring thing his ‘God’ had done was run off with that other woman.”

“So?” asked Pam. “What ‘duty’ did he feel he owed the old man?”

“So,” said Sarah, “that’s what Wright wondered as he peered into that old shifty-eyed Mississippi Negro face. What was the duty of the son of a destroyed man? The son of a man whose vision had stopped at the edge of fields that weren’t even his. Who was Wright without his father? Was he Wright the great writer? Wright the Communist? Wright the French farmer? Wright whose white wife could never accompany him to Mississippi? Was he, in fact, still his father’s son? Or was he freed by his father’s desertion to be nobody’s son, to be his own father? Could he disavow his father and live? And if so, live as what? As whom? And for what purpose?”

“Well,” said Pam, swinging her hair over her shoulders and squinting her small eyes, “if his father rejected him I don’t see why Wright even bothered to go see him again. From what you’ve said, Wright earned the freedom to be whoever he wanted to be. To a strong man a father is not essential.”

“Maybe not,” said Sarah, “but Wright’s father was one faulty door in a house of many ancient rooms. Was that one faulty door to shut him off forever from the rest of the house? That was the question. And though he answered this question eloquently in his work, where it really counted, one can only wonder if he was able to answer it satisfactorily—or at all—in his life.”

“You’re thinking of his father more as a symbol of something, aren’t you?” asked Pam.

“I suppose,” said Sarah, taking a last look around her room. “I see him as a door that refused to open, a hand that was always closed. A fist.”

Pamela walked with her to one of the college limousines, and in a few minutes she was at the station. The train to the city was just arriving.

“Have a nice trip,” said the middle-aged driver courteously, as she took her suitcase from him. But for about the thousandth time since she’d seen him, he winked at her.

Once away from her friends she did not miss them. The school was all they had in common. How could they ever know her if they were not allowed to know Wright, she wondered. She was interesting, “beautiful,” only because they had no idea what made her, charming only because they had no idea from where she came. And where they came from, though she glimpsed it—in themselves and in F. Scott Fitzgerald—she was never to enter. She hadn’t the inclination or the proper ticket.

2

Her father’s body was in Sarah’s old room. The bed had been taken down to make room for the flowers and chairs and casket. Sarah looked for a long time into the face, as if to find some answer to her questions written there. It was the same face, a dark Shakespearean head framed by gray, woolly hair and split almost in half by a short, gray mustache. It was a completely silent face, a shut face. But her father’s face also looked fat, stuffed, and ready to burst. He wore a navy-blue suit, white shirt and black tie. Sarah bent and loosened the tie. Tears started behind her shoulder blades but did not reach her eyes.

“There’s a rat here under the casket,” she called to her brother, who apparently did not hear her, for he did not come in. She was alone with her father, as she had rarely been when he was alive. When he was alive she had avoided him.

“Where’s that girl at?” her father would ask. “Done closed herself up in her room again,” he would answer himself.

For Sarah’s mother had died in her sleep one night. Just gone to bed tired and never got up. And Sarah had blamed her father.

Stare the rat down, thought Sarah, surely that will help.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I misunderstood or never understood.

“We moved so much looking for crops, a place to
live,
” her father had moaned, accompanied by Sarah’s stony silence. “The moving killed her. And now we have a real house, with
four
rooms, and a mailbox on the
porch,
and it’s too late. She gone.
She
ain’t here to see it.” On very bad days her father would not eat at all. At night he did not sleep.

Whatever had made her think she knew what love was or was not?

Here she was, Sarah Davis, immersed in Camusian philosophy, versed in many languages, a poppy, of all things, among winter roses. But before she became a poppy she was a native Georgian sunflower, but still had not spoken the language they both knew. Not to him.

Stare the rat down,
she thought, and did. The rascal dropped his bold eyes and slunk away. Sarah felt she had, at least, accomplished something.

Why did she have to see the picture of her mother, the one on the mantel among all the religious doodads, come to life? Her mother had stood stout against the years, clean gray braids shining across the top of her head, her eyes snapping, protective. Talking to her father.

“He called you out your name, we’ll leave this place today. Not tomorrow. That be too late. Today!” Her mother was magnificent in her quick decisions.

“But what about your garden, the children, the change of schools?” Her father would be holding, most likely, the wide brim of his hat in nervously twisting fingers.

“He called you out your name, we go!”

And go they would. Who knew exactly where, before they moved? Another soundless place, walls falling down, roofing gone; another face to please without leaving too much of her father’s pride at his feet. But to Sarah then, no matter with what alacrity her father moved, foot-dragging alone was visible.

The moving killed her,
her father had said,
but the moving was also love.

Did it matter now that often he had threatened their lives with the rage of his despair? That once he had spanked the crying baby violently, who later died of something else altogether…and that the next day they moved?

“No,” said Sarah aloud, “I don’t think it does.”

“Huh?” It was her brother, tall, wiry, black, deceptively calm. As a child he’d had an irrepressible temper. As a grown man he was tensely smooth, like a river that any day will overflow its bed.