Wherever There Is Light (4 page)

“Where you from, jitterbug?” Eddie said.

Aiming what had to be the cockiest grin on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line at Eddie, Otis announced, “Edgecombe Avenue, Harlem, USA.”

“Sugar Hill. Julian and me used to go hear Cab Calloway play an after-hours joint up there—but we're from Jersey.”

“Close enough. I been cracking books here since September, and away-down south in Dixie ain't nowhere for a rug-cutter from the shiny Apple, you dig?”

Eddie pointed at the fifths of Jameson's and Old Grand-Dad, and Otis said, “You swing, my man! Can I get a taste of that Irish, rocks?”

As Eddie fixed Otis a drink, Julian saw Derrick pull back a chair for Kendall at the table. Derrick was so handsome that if he'd been white, some Madison Avenue sharpie would've stuck him in an Arrow shirt-collar ad. Yet Julian wasn't without hope. You couldn't miss the intelligence in Derrick's face, but it was a face without guile, the face of an orderly man who Julian hoped would be a little too square for Kendall.

Otis said to Julian, “My big bro thinks he's in the clover 'cause he picked himself the high-yellow blossom of Lovewood. But any boy tangle with Kenni-Ann, he gonna wind up feeling like a one-legged man in an ass-kickin' contest.”

“They getting hitched?”

“Who knows? Kenni-Ann's a senior, and Derrick copped his sheepskin last June. He's down from DC to visit. He's at Howard Law. Gonna practice with our daddy's firm.”

In the dining room, Derrick was seated across from Theodor. The two men were engaged in an animated discussion, while Kendall's attention wandered until she noticed Julian staring at her. She smiled at him, her expression an enticing blend of curiosity and defiance, but before Julian could respond with a smile of his own, Kendall turned toward Derrick and his father.

The seating arrangements were a problem. Garland was at one end of the table and to her left were Julian, Elana, and Theodor; to her right were Kendall, Derrick, Otis, and Eddie. Hence, Julian was across from Kendall and had to force himself not to stare at her. In addition, during the salad course, he had to look right at Derrick and listen to him and Theodor dissect Hegel. After ten minutes of Hegelian wisdom on the order of “All the rational is real and all the real is rational,” Julian excused himself and retrieved a bottle of Old Grand-Dad.

After gulping three fingers of bourbon, Julian was feeling better, but then the butler, bearing a platter of baked chicken, stopped by his chair, and Elana piped up in the most maternal of voices, “My son likes the thighs.”

Kendall smiled at his being treated like a five-year-old, and Julian felt embarrassed as the chicken was placed on his plate. Then Elana said to her son, “Doesn't this look delicious?” and dipped a serving spoon into a bowl of string beans and heaped the vegetables beside his chicken. Staring at his food, Julian thought that his on-again off-again pal, gossipmonger Walter Winchell, would have a field day with this one, declaring in his nasal rat-a-tat-tat:
Let's go to press . . . Word has reached me that the big Jersey Rose, man-about-town and ex-giggle-water salesman, is his mommy's baby boy
.

Julian dedicated his energies to emptying the fifth of Old Grand-Dad. He overheard Otis tell Eddie that he was going to take him over to the piano in the music building and show him how “One O'clock Jump” should be played, but Derrick was doing most of the talking. His topic was the national letter-writing campaign that he and other Howard Law students had organized to once again try to convince President Roosevelt to support federal antilynching legislation.

Addressing Elana and Theodor, Derrick explained, “Down South, whites who lynch Negroes aren't prosecuted, and Florida has the most lynchings in America. In Fort Lauderdale, when I was a sophomore here, a Negro man was arrested for asking a white lady for food and—”

“That poor man had a name,” Garland cut in, her shoulders back, head high, as if her chair were a throne. “He didn't have a penny in his pocket, but he had a name.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Derrick answered. “His name was Reuben Stacey. Reuben was arrested and while the deputies were taking him to jail, a white mob took Reuben and lynched him. The police knew the murderers, but nothing was done.”

Kendall said, “I'll never forget the photo of Reuben in the papers. It was horrible.”

“Yes,” Derrick said, touching Kendall's hand. “When I saw that picture, I promised myself that one day I'd try to help and do something.”

“You could wait for people to die and better people to be born,” Julian said.

“Pardon,” Derrick replied, a keen edge to his tone.

Julian glared through a russet haze of bourbon. “Pardon what?”

Derrick had been the captain of Lovewood College's debate team, and he mistook Julian's gelid blue stare for an intellectual challenge. Otis, the hepcat, was more familiar than his older brother with men of Julian's ilk, and he called out, “Be cool, big bro.”

Derrick cast a withering glance at Otis, and Garland, who had been studying Julian, stated with an imperiousness that did not invite dissent, “Let's have dessert.”

Julian was washing down a bite of key lime pie with Old Grand-Dad when Kendall said, “Mother, we have to talk about the life drawing class.”

“We talked about it, and my answer is the same—no.”

“Drawing nudes is integral to art. Ask Professor Rose.”

Everyone, except Julian, shifted their attention to Theodor. “You are correct, Miss Wakefield—it is an aesthetic tradition with a lengthy history—but I'm a philosophy professor, and your mother is president of the college.”

Utterly controlled, Kendall told her mother, “If you don't want to pay someone to pose nude for our class, I'll do it myself.”

Julian, numb enough from drinking that a dentist could've extracted his molars without him knowing it, asked, “Can anyone sign up for that class?”

Then he laughed and heard Eddie and Otis join in. Derrick wasn't amused, and Garland was still speechless from Kendall's declaration—let alone Julian's question—and her outrage was apparent in the stern knit of her brow.

Elana, upset that her son had offended Garland, said to Kendall, “Tomorrow why don't you, Derrick, and Otis take Julian and Eddie for a tour of the campus.”

Kendall let her eyes linger on Julian, and Garland glared at her daughter as if to say,
I don't give a damn if that white boy could pass for Cary Grant, don't you dare look at him like that!

Kendall, glancing at her mother, replied, “What a terrific idea.”

Y
ou did notice Kendall's a colored gal?” Eddie said, stretched out on one of the single beds in the guest cottage.

“I got drunk, not stupid,” Julian replied, lying on the other bed. “But you figure the jerks who hate Negroes like Jews any better? Or Catholics? I don't give a shit what color anybody is.”

“A lotta people do. I bet her ma does. And you might wanna talk to Kendall about it.”

“I have to ask her out first.”

“Where you gonna take her? They won't let you in together down here.”

“To the Tavern,” Julian said, referring to the finest restaurant in Newark, where the owner was a personal friend.

“Shrewd. That's fifteen hundred miles from here. Give you a chance to talk.”

“I'm tired of being alone. You've got Fiona. Would Fiona like Kendall?” Fiona was a knockout off the boat from Dublin and employed as a barmaid at McGovern's on the night Eddie met her. The two of them were real lovebirds when they weren't threatening to kill each other.

Eddie chuckled. “Fiona likes everybody but me.”

Julian drifted off thinking about Kendall, only to be awakened when Kendall knocked on the screen door, calling, “Ready for your tour?”

“In a minute.” Julian changed into a polo shirt, linen pants, and tennis shoes, then scurried into the bathroom to take a leak and spread Pepsodent on his teeth.

“Have you seen Eddie?” he said, going outside.

“He and Derrick are listening to Otis play the piano. We're meeting them at the music building.”

Kendall was wearing a white beret, a navy-and-white Breton-striped top, and dungarees rolled up past her sleek calves.

“You're staring,” she said, smiling.

Julian followed Kendall across a blacktopped road to the campus. “I wasn't. I was just wondering when you became a French sailor.”

Kendall laughed, the faintest note of melancholy underneath the joy. That same melancholy backlit her face, one of the reasons Julian couldn't stop looking at her: she seemed to reflect his own melancholy, which made him feel less alone.

She said, “What gave me away? The beret or the shirt?”

“The shirt. I had one as a kid. The year my father lectured at the Sorbonne.”

“How wonderful. A year in Paris.”

Wonderful wasn't how Julian would describe it. He was tutored in their apartment and learned how to speak French while his mother learned how to spend sixteen hours a day in bed with the assistance of an inexpensive Bordeaux.

Kendall said, “I'm an art major, but my minor is French. I want to live in Paris.” Julian was less than overjoyed by that information but perked up when she added, “First I'm going to New York. To study at the Art Students League.”

“That was your painting in the front hall?”

“Yes, it's the mythical lovewood tree. From an Indian legend about a woman trying to return to her true love and how he waits for her under the tree forever.”

“I thought it was really something.”

“It was really derivative. I was taking a course in Monet.”

Past the chapel, with its white bell tower and steeple, was a bronze statue of a bearded Negro man in tails and top hat who stood on an inscribed granite pedestal:

EZEKIEL KENDALL

1847–1934

“AIM FOR THE HIGHEST”

“My grandfather,” Kendall said. “My mother and I lived with him in Philadelphia.”

“Your dad?”

“He died when I was a baby.” Kendall's tone had a matter-of-fact quality that was misleading. According to her mother, Robert Wakefield was a light-skinned Georgia boy with soft curly hair and chips of jade in his brown eyes who served as Ezekiel's chief assistant. Garland married him to please Ezekiel, who wanted a son-in-law to handle his catering business while he taught Garland the fine points of managing his portfolio of coal mines, oil fields, blue chips, and gold. Five months after Kendall was born, Robert announced that he was leaving and lit out for Los Angeles, where he was promptly run over by a dump truck on Los Feliz Boulevard. As a girl, poring over the brittle photographs of her father, Kendall blamed her mother for his leaving, believing that it must have been insufferable being the husband of such a driven, uncompromising woman: even her grandfather used to tease Garland by saying, “Girl, you done got the happy-go-lucky aura of Queen Victoria.” Ezekiel had been a beloved paternal stand-in for Kendall, but the absence of her father pained her. When she was in high school, Kendall resolved that if she ever had a son, his name would be Robert, not just to honor her father but, odd as it sounded, as a way to meet him.

“Ezekiel had a house the size of a castle in Center City,” Kendall said, running her fingers over her grandfather's shoes. “He had servants and a chauffeur, but every weekday morning he'd make me waffles or oatmeal and take me to school and kiss my cheek and say he loved me. You could ask him any silly thing, and he'd give you an answer right quick. Otherwise, he rarely spoke. I was intrigued by him, but he always scared me some.”

“I can see why.”

Ezekiel appeared to gaze out at a land visible only to him, and the single-mindedness on his face was so unassailable that it bordered on cruel.

“Did he have a wife?” Julian asked, and Kendall flinched at the question.

“Not that I ever met.” All families have their secrets, and Garland had shared this one with her daughter shortly after her twelfth birthday during a talk about the birds and the bees. Ezekiel, Garland said, believed he was too busy to marry, but a weak moment with a teenage girl who cleaned his home produced Garland, who was named after Ezekiel's mother. Because the cleaning girl was unsuited to the social rigors of prosperous Negro circles in Philadelphia, Ezekiel paid her to disappear into the hinterlands of Virginia from where she'd come. Kendall had never been able to connect the heartlessness of this story with the loving grandfather she knew. She explained it to herself by thinking that Ezekiel had spared her mother from the truth—that the girl had wanted to leave and Ezekiel had helped her with a handout.

Kendall, heading along a graveled path shaded by banyan trees, changed the subject: “I've been thinking about taking up photography. I've got to buy a better camera than my Brownie. A Leica: Henri Cartier-Bresson does street photography in Paris with a Leica. It's small enough to carry, and I could shoot what I see instead of dreaming up a picture to put on a canvas. Derrick tells me to keep painting, but he's gaga about Cubism. I believe reality is bizarre enough without the hard lines and angles.”