A Summer of Kings (16 page)

Stewart stood with his arms crossed and tried to look angry with me, but I saw the bruised-looking circles under his eyes and knew he was more exhausted than angry. I was just about to suggest we go home and forget about King-Roy, when I saw him. I saw King-Roy standing up near the front of the crowd, with a girl in a flowered dress standing next to him and leaning on his shoulder.

"It's him," I said to the lady. I reached for Sophia. "I'll take her now. I've found who we were looking for. Thanks for being so nice."

The woman handed Sophia over into my arms and said, "You take care, now."

With Sophia in my arms and Stewart following close behind, I pushed through the crowd until I reached King-Roy and the girl. "King-Roy?" I said.

King-Roy looked over at me, and the girl turned around, still hanging on King-Roy. She was a tall, light-skinned Negro girl, wearing pink lipstick, with thick frizzed-out hair and long eyelashes that curled way up toward her eyebrows. She looked surprised to see us and so did King-Roy.

"Esther, what are you doing here?" He walked
backward, drawing us away from the crowd and across the street.

"We came to find you," I said, following him. I shifted Sophia higher up on my hip. "You were supposed to meet us at four, remember? It's almost seven and Mother's going to kill me. Why didn't you show up? What happened? What are you doing here?"

I stood staring up at King-Roy, who looked at me with his mellow expression as though he didn't care that we had dragged ourselves all over Harlem looking for him, and I felt tears stinging my eyes. "King-Roy?" I said.

"I'm sorry, Esther," he said, trying to look sorry but not succeeding. "I called your house and I told your Auntie Pie I wasn't coming home. I thought you'd call home, too, and they would tell you that. I'm sorry y'all came out here looking for me. I never would have expected that."

"These the kids you were tellin' me about, then?" the girl asked King-Roy, hanging herself back onto his shoulder again.

"Yeah," King-Roy said. He gestured toward me with his one free hand. "This is Esther and that's Sophia and that's Stewart." He smiled at the girl. "This is Yvonne."

The girl probably wasn't much older than I was, and there she was calling me a kid. Had King-Roy called me that? What about our hug in the theater? Didn't that mean anything to him? I felt furious. I set Sophia down
on her own two feet and said, "You told me you would meet us at four. You said you were going to teach me how to tap, remember? Remember, you ... you hugged me and asked me if I believed you were coming back and I said yes because you had agreed to teach me tap. Remember? And you hugged me," I said, glancing back and forth between King-Roy and Yvonne. "Remember?"

King-Roy's expression didn't change. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, things happened and now I'm staying here, here where I belong." He eyed Yvonne when he said the words "
where I belong,
" and I felt my heart sink into my stomach.

The crowd was breaking up and King-Roy waved to the man who had been doing all the talking, to let him know where he had moved to, I guess.

"Is that Ax?" I asked.

King-Roy smiled. "That's Ax, all right. He's gon' let me stay with him awhile."

"And you?" I asked Yvonne. "Do you live with Ax, too?"

The girl nodded. "I'm his sister." Then she giggled and gave King-Roy a peck on the cheek for no reason at all except that she just felt like it, I guess.

I didn't know how girls got away with flirting like that. I didn't know the first thing about how to flirt, as Kathy and Laura had reminded me often enough, saying, "You're born knowing, Esther. You've either got the knack or you don't, and you don't." I told them I didn't
want it. Watching girls flirt, it always looked so stupid I didn't understand why any boy would fall for it, but I could see that King-Roy loved it. He fell for it completely.

"So I guess you'd better get on home now," he said. "You want me to walk you to the subway?"

I knew that walking us to the subway station was the last thing King-Roy wanted to do, and I felt too angry and hurt to want him with us, so I said, "No, thank you. We
kids
are fully capable of getting home on our own. Remember,
I
showed
you
how to get to Harlem this morning."

I grabbed Sophia and Stewart's hands and marched away, and I didn't mind when Sophia said, "I never did like that boy," loud enough for King-Roy to hear it.

I was miserable on the train ride home. Not only had I lost King-Roy and my dream of an exotic, summer romance, which, I realized, had been a flop right from the start, but I knew what would be waiting for me when we got home. Before we climbed onto the train I had called Mother to let her know we were on our way, and she had asked, "Where have you been? Don't you know we've been worried sick here? Esther, you're old enough to know better. I'm ashamed of you!"

I let her rant on for another minute before I interrupted her and told her that we were going to miss our train if we didn't get going. Mother said, "Don't think this is over, young lady. Not by a long shot. I'm so ashamed of you, I don't know what to do."

I heard more from Sophia on the train ride home until Stewart, seeing how miserable I was, told her to shut her mouth. "You're giving me a headache," he said.

"How come you're on Esther's side all of a sudden?" she asked.

Stewart looked over at me and then back at her and shrugged. "I guess because she's right sometimes, Sophia."

"Well, she wasn't right dragging us to that horrible Harlem. I will never be able to wash all the dirt and poverty of that place out of my hair." She tossed her head back and lifted her eyes to the roof of the train, and I could just see her mind imagining herself onstage, making her dramatic pronouncement and flouncing off into the wings. Since she didn't have a stage to flounce off of, she turned to me instead and said, "Esther, massage my feet; they're killing me."

I had had enough of her for one day and I let her have it, even if she had said all that about Harlem for dramatic effect and was only six years old. "Why don't you think of someone besides yourself for a change?" I grabbed her right foot and began massaging the ball of it. "None of the people living in those apartments gets a chance to just wash the poverty away. They've got to live in it every stinking day of their lives, and it's our fault, too."

Sophia giggled and propped her left foot up in my lap and nudged me to massage that foot, too. Both her big toes and her pinky toes were rubbed raw and blistered from her shoes and the long walk. "You didn't believe that fat old jelly up on the soapbox, did you, Esther? We're not really made from test tubes, you know."

The man, Ax, had made the whole thing with the test tubes sound possible to me somehow, but Sophia made it sound ridiculous. I didn't say anything, though, and the three of us were quiet the rest of the way home.

My father picked us up at the train station, and when
I climbed onto the front seat of the car, next to him, he didn't even look in my direction. He pulled out of the parking space and sped off, and the only thing he said to any of us was "It's after nine o'clock," which he said more to the windshield, really.

When we got home and out of the car, we found Mother waiting for us out on the porch along with Auntie Pie and Monsieur Vichy, who stood staring down at me with a gloating kind of smile as if to say, "I said all along you'd be the family scandal."

"Esther took us to Harlem, Mother," Sophia said as soon as she climbed out of the car. "It was horrible. Negroes were grabbing at me all over the place, and there was blood and vomit, and we heard gunshots, and we saw rats..."

On and on she went, relishing every bit of the tale and the red fury she saw on Mother's face, directed at me.

I finally knew what the expression "She was livid" really looked like, because Mother looked livid. Until then I had always pictured a slab of raw liver when people used the expression, but even though it was raw, all right, it was pure raw anger.

"Stewart and Sophia, you can go to your rooms. We want to talk to Esther alone," Mother said.

The two of them climbed the porch steps and crossed the floor, but then at the door, Stewart stopped and turned around and said, "Esther took good care of us, Mother and Dad. King-Roy had promised to meet us at four but he never showed up. We thought he was lost
again. Esther was just doing what you asked her to do. She was just trying to keep us together." He stepped inside the door and added, "I think she did the right thing." Then he turned and followed Sophia inside.

Hearing Stewart defend me to Mother and Dad the way he did made me want to cry. I was full of so many emotions, I wanted to cry anyway, but I didn't. I saved it for when I was up in my room.

I stood with my head bowed, peering up at my parents from under my bangs, while Mother and Dad each had their say about how disappointed they were in me and how I was old enough to know better and how lucky we had all been not to have been kidnapped or worse, and I let their words slam against me and bounce back off again. I was too exhausted and sad and fed up to absorb their words. Dad strode back and forth across the porch, ranting, while Mother stood right where she was and pointed at me, jab, jab, jabbing her finger in my direction, and I watched as though it was a play, a silly play with highly dramatic people all saying their parts. Monsieur Vichy
tsk, tsk, tsked,
while Auntie Pie shook her head back and forth the whole time like she had palsy.

When the whole ordeal was over and my parents had announced that I would not be joining the family for the end-of-July barbecue at the country club that next Saturday night, my father asked me if I had anything to say. My parents always asked me that after they yelled at me and I knew they wanted some appropriate response, but I never got it right. I never said I'm sorry right, and
everything else I had ever said had been wrong, too. Everything else always made them even angrier. This time when my father asked me if I had anything to say, I said just what was on my mind. "If you think I'm just so immature and stupid, why do you keep putting me in charge? Why don't you just lock me in my room already and throw away the key? I don't care." I stormed across the porch and into the house. I marched up the steps, expecting any second that my parents would call me back to yell at me some more, but they didn't, and when I reached the top of the steps, I ran into Beatrice and the Beast coming out of her servants' quarters, only I almost didn't recognize her. She had dyed her hair a dark brown and she had on a simple navy-blue dress and a pair of matching pumps. Before I could stand back and take it all in, and before I could say anything, Beatrice patted her hair and said, "Don't you go thinking this has a thing to do with anything you said. I don't go taking my advice from the likes of you."

"I know," I said.

"My hairdresser told me the bleach was ruining my hair."

"Okay," I said, turning in the direction of my bedroom. "I don't care what you do, anyway," I added over my shoulder. Then I ran down the hallway to my room and threw myself on my bed and cried and cried, and the last thing I remember before I cried myself to sleep was the cold image of King-Roy's face in front of me, telling me he wasn't coming back.

I woke up early the next morning determined to forget about King-Roy and all my silly romantic fantasies and to make things better between Pip and me. It seemed that every time we did our cross-country-training runs, we got into an argument. It was always about me. Pip said I wasn't listening to him. He said my mind was always on King-Roy. I told him I
was
listening to him, and I even repeated back exactly what he had said to me, but maybe he was right, because later I couldn't remember any of what we had talked about except that our conversations had always ended with an argument. This time I was going to try my hardest to show Pip that I knew I was lucky to have him as a friend and that I had put all my silly fantasies about King-Roy behind me.

I got myself dressed and ready for our run. I put on the Yankees baseball cap Pip once gave me and the Kennedy for President campaign button with President Kennedy's head on it that he'd also given to me. I pinned it to the one-piece gym uniform, which was way too big on me, so the elastic-trimmed undershorts hung down below the outer cuff almost to my knees. Mother had
gotten the uniform large on purpose because it had to last three more years of high school. She had insisted I would grow into it. I figured Mother thought I was going to be an Amazon woman by the time I was a senior in high school. The gym uniform was the only clean item I had left to wear because I had forgotten to bring down my laundry, but that morning I didn't care. I even wrapped the Boy Scout belt Pip had given me around my waist, hoping to lift up the uniform some. It didn't work very well, but at least I would be showing Pip how much I appreciated him.

I was early for our run, so I sat outside on the polar bear rock and waited for Pip. It felt good to sit in the dark with my old friend, Polar Bear, his white granite body appearing ghostlike in the moonlight. I used to like to talk to the bear and tell him my troubles, believing he was listening. I guess I knew better than to do that now, but in the back of my mind I still thought maybe he could hear me, so I talked to him, whispering all my hurts and sorrows.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," I told him. "I don't know why I felt so desperate for King-Roy to like me in the first place. What did I expect, anyway? He's eighteen. He's a man, really, and he's a black man. Pip is right, we're from two different worlds." I took a deep breath. "But I'm scared. I'm scared and I don't know why I'm scared. Losing King-Roy yesterday—I don't know, it means something. I feel like something big and tragic has happened, but I don't know what it is. I don't
know what I'm feeling, but it makes me miserable and sad and scared." I patted the rock—a polar bear lying on its side—and ran my hand back and forth along its white body.

A while later the sun began to come up and I knew, without looking at my watch, that Pip was late. He was never late, and I tried to recall if he had said something to me about coming later. I thought about this for some time and then, before I could decide on whether or not to head back inside, I looked up from my polar bear and saw Pip enter through our gate. He had someone with him, and that's when I remembered that he had told me that one of his pen pals was coming to stay with him for a couple of weeks. Every summer Pip had a new pen pal come visit. He had told me this pen pal was from White Plains, the only New York pen pal he had.