And All Our Wounds Forgiven (7 page)

She feared that with age the flesh would expand and sag, and cheekbone and tura-of-lip and curve-of-lash would fade into folds of skin, while wrinkles, like tread marks, would reveal the weight of the vehicles that had passed in the nights.

“You look as if no vehicles passed through your nights, Andrea. You look as if you never cried in the darkness. That cannot be. What was it like when they called and told you Cal had been assassinated? Were you relieved the waiting was finally over? Or were you surprised it had actually happened, surprised someone had dared kill John Calvin Marshall? And what was it like when you turned on the television and saw the film of his dying body being held lovingly against my breasts, saw me holding him with that subtle familiarity of touch that comes only after a thousand nights of touches? I was explained away as his ‘longtime personal secretary.’
But it is one thing to know your husband is sleeping with another woman. It is quite another to see him lying in her arms, dying.”

She wished her fingers were like the silicon chips of computers that remembered whatever was put onto them and, with a keystroke, or the click of a computer mouse, memory was restored. There, somewhere, in the whorls of her fingertips was the softness of his flesh, the tight curls of his hair, the fullness of his lips. What command would access what was now dust?

Elizabeth looked back at the woman in the bed. Traces of dark blue eyeshadow stuck to her eyelids near the lashes. Had she been taking off her makeup when she had the stroke? Or were those blue traces the accretion of years of eyeshadow applied when her eyes glistened like sunlight on dew because love was young and so was she, and applied ever more thickly when love, like the dew, evaporated in the heat of the day?

And why blue? Elizabeth wondered. Was that a sublimated longing to have blue eyes, a statement of black inferiority inculcated by a lifetime of Estee Lauder images of the beautiful? Had Andrea worn blue eyeshadow thirty years ago and Elizabeth not noticed? Or had she seen it then, and not believing it a color for brown skin, not seen?

She opened the drawer in the night table next to the bed looking for cotton balls or Q-Tips. Not finding either, she supposed she could have asked a nurse. Instead, she wet her index finger in her mouth and gently rubbed the comatose woman’s eyelids until the color was gone.

“I never got used to the tonal variety and richness of his skin color. I never wanted to. As a child I found it magical that I could turn brown by being in the sun. When I first saw black people and found out they were born that way, well ...” She chuckled aloud. “. . . in my child’s mind, black people were magical!”

No one more so than Cal, with his high cheekbones and large dark brown eyes, eyes whose wideness and vulnerability hid behind rose-tinted glasses. He was light-brown-skinned, at least his face was. His chest was another brown, his legs still another.

Once she had compiled a list of all the shades of brown. They had been amazed. There were 140 varieties. Some were obvious: beige, toast, khaki, sorrel, oak. Others were romantic and evocative: Sahara, gazelle, Arab, bamboo, deer. Others were exotic and incomprehensible: pablo, badious, kolinsky, cauldron, hopi.

He shared her delight. “I wish Negroes could see their skin color as you see mine.”

“Well, if they did, they would have to think about something else that has mystified me for quite a while.”

He heard the smile in her voice and answered in kind. “And what might that be?”

“Well, your hands are exposed to sunlight everyday. So, it makes sense that the backs of your hands are darker than your arm. But why does your face stay lighter than your hand? And your penis and ass never see the light, and they’re almost black!”

He laughed loudly.

“What shade of brown do you think your penis might be?” She looked at the list. “I don’t think it’s tallyho brown, do you? No. What about Isabel Brown? Did you ever sleep with an Isabel Brown or an Isabel anybody? Don’t answer that. Ah! Ruddle brown! You certainly ruddle me. But I honestly don’t know if I can make an accurate assessment without looking at the subject under discussion.” She undid his belt, the top button of his trousers, unzipped his pants, and reaching inside the opening of his jockey shorts, grasped his penis, already stiffening in anticipation of her mouth and lips and tongue, and pulled it out . . .

Even now, the years having passed with the lugubriousness of eternity, her eyes were wet with tears, and her vagina moistened more at the memory of a dead man than it ever had with Gregory.

“Time does not heal when past is presence,” she said aloud. “Does it, Andrea? You made a career out of being his widow. People see you at a rally, a demonstration or meeting, and they are thrust back into the heroic days of the sixties. They see you and the fabric of time hiding past from present is ripped, and as you stand at the lectern, people hear German shepherd dogs snarling and snapping at black children in the streets of Birmingham. They are standing shoulder to shoulder, one among the quarter million at the Capitol, swaying from side to side, singing ‘Black and white together . . . We shall overcome someday’. They see you and fall into the deeper sleep of yesterday’s dead hopes and perished dreams.

“Sometimes, when I am feeling bitter and angry and alone, I think his death was the best thing that could have happened for you. It gave your life a purpose, something it had never had. You’ve done very well making a career as the widow of John Calvin Marshall. You get invited to the White House. You are interviewed on TV when there are racial troubles somewhere. Presidential candidates have their picture taken with you, seeking your endorsement as if it were an imprimatur.

“You’re our real Jackie Kennedy because the flesh-and-blood one went on with her life and became Jacqueline Onassis. The nation never forgave her for that. But you became our dowager queen wearing the blood-stained memories of idealism and the hope for a better tomorrow.

“I would look at you on TV and wonder if you were getting any. Have you really gone twenty-five years without sex? More, because you and he didn’t have much of a sex life before. And how would I know? The way his body responded to mine told me a lot about how it did not respond to yours.”

Elizabeth stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “If you were to die at this moment, I would not want those words to be the ones you took into the vacuum of eternity.”

Leaning her elbow on the bed, she took one of the woman’s hands in hers. “I think I am angry, Andrea, because at least you found
something
to do with your life. While I? I ski.” She laughed, harshly, almost maniacally. “That’s right. I ski. I have a lovely house on a mountain in Vermont. In fact, I own the mountain. My husband is a dentist in Bur- lington, and he comes home on weekends. I have my horses and the mountain and in the winter, virgin snow and skis.”

What if he had lived? Probably nothing would have changed. She would still be living on a mountain in Vermont, grieving, because John Calvin Marshall would not have left his wife for a white woman eleven years his junior.

i had always conceived of history as benign, a patchwork quilt making a beautiful and warm whole. i learned that history is taloned and beaked and lusts for blood.

i remember standing on the steps of the capitol that summer afternoon. almost as far as my eyes could see up that great mall from the capitol to the lincoln memorial were people. blacks. whites. young. old. they had come to demonstrate for freedom. and they had come to hear john calvin marshall.

i had become a messiah, the one who would save them from the old life of sin and initiate them into a new tomorrow of freedom and purity.

but i was only mortal. when i ate the wrong thing my shit smelled just like theirs. why did they not know that? did they honestly think i could save them?

i listened to the cheers and applause and it was all i could do not to walk away. whom were they cheering? it wasn’t me. it was john calvin marshall whom they had created in their own image. for an instant, i think i hated them. and myself.

but i did not walk away. i stood there and when the cheering and applause finally stopped, my lips parted and the words poured forth as they always did. there was no thought. speech and thought were indivisible and the two became deed. at those moments, and especially on that particular day, i think i came as close as it is possible for a human being to feel like God, to speak and the word is action. if i had told them to turn and storm the white house fences, they would have done so. but i did not.

“I have come here today to plead with the white people of this nation for freedom. But I do not come to plead for freedom for the Negro. No! It is the white man’s freedom I seek. Just because you are white and can walk into any restaurant in this nation and be served does not mean you are free. It only means you are privileged, and privilege always exists at the expense of another’s degradation. The Negro cannot be free until you stop being white. Only when you stop being white will you stop seeing us as black. Only then will you see that you have been wounded by this disfiguring notion of race more deeply even than we. Freedom can come only when we forgive the wounds inflicted on us by the other — and the ones we’ve inflicted on ourselves.”

they cheered. they applauded. blacks and whites hugged each other and cried and i suppose it did not matter that this moment of utopian euphoria would not last even into the evening. the fact that the moment had existed at all was sufficient. the hope had been created that there could be other moments like it, and maybe somewhere on the backside of history enough of those moments would come together to create a new world.

the next morning the washington post and the new york times praised my speech and speculated that a run for the presidency by me might not succeed but it would certainly make a more honest man out of jfk.

i put down the newspapers slowly. elizabeth and i were having breakfast on the balcony of our suite. it was a clear morning, not too hot yet. i could see in the distance the dome of the capitol. “i am not that man,” i said softly. “i am not that man.” elizabeth had already read the papers and knew what i was talking about.

“who are you?” she asked quietly.

i shook my head. “i don’t know. i don’t know.”

around nine that evening there was a knock on the door of the suite. elizabeth and i were sitting on the balcony, drinking after dinner coffee and allowing ourselves to be mesmerized by the floodlights playing against the washing-ton monument. the knock at the door startled us. who knew we were there? i had checked into one hotel the night before the march, but elizabeth had arranged for us to go to another one afterward so we could have a rare weekend to ourselves.

she opened the door to see two men in dark suits.

“we’re from the bureau, miss adams,” one said, holding his identification for her to see. “the director would like to see dr. marshall.”

“at this time of night?” i queried, having come into the living room.

“yes, sir.”

“give me a moment to get dressed,” i responded.

elizabeth followed me into the bedroom. “what’s going on?”

i shook my head. “i don’t know.”

“shall i come with you?”

“no. i’ll be all right.”

i quickly put on a white shirt, tie and suit and left with the two agents. we went down the service elevator, through the basement and into a car waiting in the alley. they did not want me to be seen anymore than i wanted to be.

i did not bother to ask them what was going on. the director of the bureau did not always share what he knew with presidents, so i knew he wouldn’t have told two mere agents why he wanted to see me.

what had happened that would impel the director to want to see me outside normal business hours? i had been critical of the bureau and its agents more than once for their failure to protect civil rights workers. the director and i had exchanged words in the press over this. why did the director want to see me
now?

of course. the march. the editorials in the times and the post. john calvin marshall was suddenly a presence, a power to be reckoned with. i wondered if the kennedy brothers were behind this, or if the director was acting on his own.

we reached the justice department quickly and i was taken in a private elevator to the director’s office on the fifth floor. the office of the attorney general was also on the floor and i had been there more than once to meet with the younger kennedy brother. was he in there, waiting for the director to tell him how the meeting with me had gone?

i was taken into the outer office. one of the agents knocked on the door of the director’s office. a voice within responded. the agent opened the door, motioned me to enter and when i did, pulled it closed behind me.

the director sat behind an enormous desk, and i smiled to myself. the bigger the desk, the smaller the man. he did not rise or smile. he did, indeed, look like a bulldog — the recessed forehead, the heavy cheeks, the squareness of the skull. but a bulldog’s eyes were free of malevolence. the director’s eyes scintillated with it.