After the War (22 page)

Or had she possibly come out here, so stupidly unconscious, because she hoped to see Abby’s friend, the mythically handsome (supposedly) Ben Davis? Who, she then remembered, is not even in med school; he turned it down and switched to some other line of study. Besides, if she were in fact looking for Ben Davis, how would she know him, or for that matter, how could he know her? Especially as she sat there on that bench, her hair too curly and long, her breasts too large (she was as usual hunched over to hide them). Kind Abby, her friend, would not have said any of those things describing her, Melanctha. But Abby could not possibly be out here, on Longwood Avenue, in front of Harvard Medical School, looking for Benny Davis, who did not even go to med school.

Melanctha felt that in some inner and crucial way she was seriously off track, maybe truly crazy, which she could
not be;
she could not be crazy, could not be like her mother, crazy SallyJane. She could not have gone mad in this heavy sultry unnatural displaced heat, which seemed to Melanctha to have risen up from the South.

With the utmost care and deliberation she got up from the bench and walked toward a sign that read Bus Stop, and then listed directions to Park Street, the all-change stop in Boston, which she wanted. And that was where, with the most extreme care as to both choosing and getting off and on cars, she at last arrived and found the easier-to-manage subway to Cambridge: Kendall, Central, Harvard Square.

She got off at the Square, and walked back through the Cambridge Common, past the Commander Hotel, to Whitman
Hall, where at last upstairs in her room she fell across her bed in total exhaustion, forgetting dinner, forgetting everything—almost.

The next morning, she got up, rested and
okay
, and she walked to the Square for breakfast at St. Clair’s. And then she took the subway to Park Street, changed to a trolley, and proceeded to Roxbury with no trouble. And she found, after walking around for a while, the tumbling-down gray house that she thought must belong to the family of Ed Faulkner—for no reason at all except the strength of her own instinct.

Recent hot weather, including this day’s heavy, turgid heat, had yellowed and almost flattened the overgrown grasses that surrounded the broken cement path leading up to the broad and (very likely) once grand front door. The house and its scraggly yard were raised up, separated from the sidewalk by a grayish sagging concrete wall, at which Melanctha now stood, gazing up at those blank wide windows, that door—when something amazing happened: the door cracked and then swung wide open—and out came Odessa! Great tall Odessa from Pinehill. Who used to work for awful Dolly Bigelow, and then for Cynthia Baird, and now sort of lives at Cynthia’s in a garage apartment. But now here she was in Roxbury, next to Cambridge, Mass. Odessa in a puffy yellow dress with a ruffled white apron, and her hair piled up in some kind of a yellow turban, so that she looked even taller, more majestic.

But of course it was not Odessa, who would never wear yellow (she always favored dark clothes, maybe because she was so big), or ruffles on an apron, or a turban, for heaven’s sake. It was just a tall scowling woman of about Odessa’s size, and of her color—and whatever was wrong with her, with
Melanctha? What kind of Southern-bigot-racist was she, thinking all Negroes looked alike?

Laboriously, tired and defeated, Melanctha made her way by trolley car and subway back to Cambridge. Back to the dorm and to the empty smoking room, where she did not feel like reading. Especially not
Melanctha
, which the section man thought was Gertrude Stein’s masterpiece and which she was supposed to be reading along with Faulkner.

She heard the phone ring down at the switchboard, which was one floor below where she was, and she half expected someone to answer; then remembered that no one would, there was no one else there. She smiled to think that no one,
no one
could find her there.

But someone did answer the phone, and the next thing Melanctha heard was her own name, “Melanctha Byrd! Miss Byrd!” in the harsh angry Irish voice of Hattie, who seemed to be the only maid around. “Melanctha, line one!”

Goddam it, she thought. It had to be Deirdre, just checking on her. Damn it, damn Deirdre. And no way to pretend she was not there: Hattie had seen her come upstairs.

But it was a man’s voice that said, “Hello? Is this Melanctha?” And in just that first instant she thought, A colored man? He sounds colored. And then, Bigot, Southern pig—she lambasted herself.

But she answered, “Yes?”

“This is, uh, Benny Davis? Abigail’s friend. Uh, Abby told me you’d come back to school early, and I thought—”

• • •

His face was powerful, the skin bright black and smooth and mysterious, especially in the candlelit booth where they sat, in the Oxford Grill. His eyebrows were also thick and heavy, and his brow commanding. His lashes were thick (almost too thick, for a man?) his nose long and broad, and his mouth—his mouth was—you could only call it
sexy
, long and curvy, a beautiful (too beautiful) mouth.

Earlier, as they had walked in, Melanctha had had a terrified sense of being stared at, as though at any minute someone might loudly, horribly cry out: Who’s that nigger with that young white bitch, or is she maybe part nigger, with that kinky hair?

But that voice was a Southern voice, rural, redneck (no one in Pinehill said “nigger”)—and she was now in Cambridge, Mass., where people stared because Benny was so conspicuously handsome, and probably a lot of them knew who he was: Benny Davis, last year’s football star, now 4-F because of a football injury, a torn ligament that made him limp a little—who had turned down early admission to Harvard Med, just saying he didn’t want to be a doctor anymore.

Now, halfway through the second Scotch, which she had not much wanted although it tasted better and better, Melanctha was saying, “… and I didn’t really know what I’d do about this Ed Faulkner if I found him, you know?”

He said, Benny Davis said, “I do know. Those imperative impulses that you don’t quite understand.” His voice was deep and gentle—beautiful.

“Imperative,” Melanctha echoed, in a pleased whisper, mostly to herself. She felt that he had understood whatever
she meant but had been unable to say. She was a little dizzy, and blinked to stay awake.

And Benny then said, “And now I’m going to order us up some French fries. They’re really good here, and I’m hungry, and you’ll have to help me out. You get one whale of a lot.”

French fries! How could he have known? Melanctha loved French fries above all else, just great crispy French fries with catsup; she could eat French fries forever, at any time, even times like now when she didn’t really feel like eating—although she knew that she should eat something, she had not got around to lunch. If she didn’t eat she’d be drunk; she might be drunk anyway.

“Do you know Abby’s friend Joseph Marcus, and his sister, uh, Susan?” Ben was asking, quite out of the blue, it seemed to Melanctha.

“Not really, I mean we haven’t met, but of course I’ve heard so much. You know,” she told him, “French fries are my truly favorite thing. I love them.” She had meant it, but how incredibly silly she sounded, how girl-undergraduate, and worse, how Southern. Her very accent must sound terrible to him although she did still catch certain Southern turns in his speech.

“Really nice, the whole family, I think,” Ben told her, sounding not entirely as though he meant it, something perfunctory in his voice.

“You met them all?” Feeling better at the very prospect of French fries, Melanctha was curious.

“Uh, yes, I did. A couple of times. Together and sort of separately.” He looked away, around the room, as though conceivably the Marcuses might all be there—at separate tables, maybe. And then he said, with a laugh but sounding as though
he absolutely meant it, “I think Joseph is almost good enough for Abigail.”

“Oh good, I’m glad you think so. She really likes him.”

They were still talking about how great Abigail was when the French fries came, and at even the first few bites Melanctha felt better, so much so that she said, “You may have saved my life. I was feeling a little rocky.”

“I thought maybe you did.”

“Maybe you should have been a doctor, after all.”

“Maybe so. I just wish I knew what I was—was going to do, I mean.”

“But you could be anything!” Good Lord, was she drunk, after all?

Wryly, “I’m afraid that’s true,” he said. And then he asked, “How would you look with your hair cut really short? You’ve thought about that?”

She could feel an uncomfortable, unreasonable blush. “Not lately, I mean I’ve been really busy. Trying to decide stuff.” As she thought, I’ll get it cut tomorrow. I’ll call the Ritz, they’re supposed to be best—she remembered that Rosalyn, the most beautiful (and richest) girl in Whitman Hall, had said that.

Ben said, “In a way, you remind me a little bit of Susan Marcus.”

Melanctha forced a laugh. “She has long kinky hair?”

“Oh, come on, not at all.” He mused. “Don’t know what it is.”

Melanctha immediately thought, All white girls are alike? She drinks too much? One more nice-girl incipient alcoholic … I wonder if her parents drink a lot too; it seems to run in families, I think.

“Her parents are kind of, uh, odd,” Ben told her, exactly as though she had asked the question aloud.

“Odd how?” God, so are mine! she wanted to say.

“Well, they talk a lot about the Party, I guess they mean Communists, and they say a lot about Russia that sounds sort of, uh, sentimental. I mean I admire that army too, they’ve been incredible, but I don’t know, with the Marcuses it’s more like worship.”

“Oh.” The oddity of the Marcuses, then, was entirely unlike that of her own parents, nothing to do with drinking, or sex, or depression, nothing like that. Following her own rather than Ben’s train of thought she told him, “My stepbrother’s coming up to Harvard next year. He’s really my half-brother, I mean, my father was his father too, but no one was supposed to know that, and then after my mother died my father married his mother, that’s Deirdre. His name is Graham. He and Abby used to be really friends—in fact, he was the first one of us she met.”

“I sort of remember, something about the pretty little boy with a beautiful mom. Is he still a pretty little boy?”

“Well, not exactly.”

Feeling better, Melanctha became more aware of her surroundings. Immediately before her there was the giant glass bottle onto which many colors of candle wax had dripped, like a painter’s palette, she thought. Not having seen this done before, she assumed it to be accidental.

And she had never sat in a booth in a public place, or for that matter, in any place with a Negro man. She knew that she should not think of it that way, but still she could not resist the thought of Dolly Bigelow, for example, or Irene Lee, any of those women from home, from Pinehill, walking in. Would they screech, and try to get her out of there, or just plain faint dead away? No, neither of those; she knew exactly what they would do, which would be to pretend she was
simply not there, and certainly that Ben Davis was not there—and then they would go home and talk about it for the rest of their lives, if not longer. “You-all won’t believe this, but up in this sort of restaurant in Cambridge, near Harvard College, we saw that Melanctha Byrd, we’d know her anywhere with that hair, and those—that
chest—
”

“You have the nicest smile,” Ben Davis told her.

“Oh, I was thinking”—she grinned—“I was thinking of getting my hair cut really short.”

A little later, she was able to ask him what she had been wondering all night, off and on: “How come you have sort of a Southern accent, growing up in Connecticut?”

“Both parents,” he told her. “Up from Alabama in the twenties, round the time I was born.”

After another pause, Melanctha said (again), “These fries were terrific. Just what I needed.”

“Sure you don’t want anything a little more substantial, like a hamburger? A nice steak?”

“Oh no, thanks, I really don’t.” Melanctha had spoken more vehemently than she meant to, but the very mention of those foods had made her stomach roil and churn again. She was not all right.

Observant, and very kind, Ben Davis said, “I think we’ll take a cab. I don’t feel like all that walk either, my goddam leg.”

After walking up to the Square, they quickly got a cab, and the drive from there to Whitman Hall was brief. However, in the course of that drive Melanctha had time for two observations: one, that she felt much better, she was really okay now; and two, that she liked this Ben Davis very much. In a curious way, he felt to her like a very old friend, someone she could perfectly trust, who was warm and kind, with no bad surprises.

19

Veracity

Has an infinite capacity

For inventive mendacity

Despite her opacity

   
—stupid tenacity—

   
—her pushy audacity—

   
—well-known rapacity—

T
HUS Cynthia somewhat bitterly amused herself; it could go on and on, she saw—such a fortunate name, from her point of view. At the same time, she invented for herself an actual Lady V., whom she saw as tall and skinny, like a crane, with a great long pointed “aristocratic” nose, skimpy hair, and no breasts. Although at the same time a more reasonable interior voice informed her that under no circumstances even for a moment would Harry pay the least attention to anyone who looked like that. He liked medium-sized green-eyed blondes, with nice teeth and pretty breasts. Like her. Cynthia’s eyes teared for an instant at this recognition, but in the next minute she was angry again as she thought, Was it possible that Harry thought the two of them looked alike, she and this mythical Lady V.?