And Do Remember Me (20 page)

When Noble revealed during Macon’s visit that his wife Angela had filed for a divorce, Macon was surprised at the relief she felt. For, she had assured herself, no, she did not want Noble Carson. Never in a million years.

M
ACON ERASED THE
messages on the answering machine and recalled that when she and Noble had gone out the previous week she had told him about the cancer, about how afraid she had been, how much she had wanted to live.

He told her about prison, saying, “There was a period, around the middle of my sentence, when being there was a relief. My creditors couldn’t get to me. There were almost no decisions that I had to make for myself. I didn’t have to try to impress anybody. Everybody there had fucked up. Nobody was pointing a finger.”

“Are you saying you experienced a spiritual awakening in prison?” Macon asked.

“I wish I had,” he said slowly. “I know this has been hard on our friendship, your view of me. You must think I let you down, that I sullied the reputation of the race, and affirmed everything white folks think about niggers with power.” A brittle edge frosted his words.

“Noble, I don’t give a damn what white folks think. But I was afraid for you.”

“I don’t want to tell you how many times I was afraid for me too.”

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Since the operation I’ve kind of avoided relationships.”

“Oh, damn, Macon, I don’t believe this, not you, in emotional retreat?”

“It takes time,” she protested.

“I want to see you sometimes,” he said, the request a soft kiss on her cheek. In response to her silence, he said, “Macon, I want to bring you flowers.”

“Noble, I don’t know,” she said, wanting to run, wondering how he would feel if he saw her chest.

“I do,” he insisted, his voice brisk with impatience, with the stubborn, take-charge force that she loved and hated at the same time.

“But we’re friends. I don’t want to lose that.”

“How do you know we won’t remain friends?”

“Lately, my track record hasn’t been so great.”

“Macon, I’m lonely. You don’t have to say you are too. Just tell me I can take you out. That I can kiss you. Bring you flowers. Why can’t you just say yes? I’ve been before one judge and jury. I don’t need another one. Will you be my court of appeals?”

N
OBLE HAD CALLED
again, sounding happy to find her at home, and told Macon he would see her around eight-thirty. The house was a mess. Macon made a turkey sandwich and
gobbled it down. She changed into jeans and a tee shirt and cleaned up the kitchen and the living room, deliberately, carefully, even vacuuming the floors and dusting the massive bookshelves. She cleaned the house in a frenzy of dedication and when she was done she fell on the sofa, her body moist with sweat, fatigue and exhilaration. But the desire was still there. She had not extinguished it as she had hoped. After a quick shower, she dried herself in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. Her doctor had proudly called the incision a clean cut. The skin where the cut was made had folded over into a soft flap. Macon stood before the mirror and caressed her breast and rubbed the skin over her chest. No man had seen her like this. For all the courage she liked to think she possessed, the thought of Noble seeing this terrified her. A week ago she had had a checkup—the blood test, the bone and liver scan—to see if the cancer had returned. The tests were all negative. But she would never again be able to take her life for granted.

W
HEN NOBLE
arrived, he kissed Macon gently, holding her close in the hallway before entering the living room. To her surprise, she did not resist him, but felt oddly relieved by the assertiveness of his touch.

She told him about the ransacking of the BSU offices, saying, “You know what frightens me most? Young people did this. Kids. I think I could handle it better if I knew adult Klansmen had done it. But if kids did this, what happens to the idea of each generation being an improvement over the one that preceded it? What am I doing in the classroom? What are any of us doing there?”

“Racism is a virus,” Noble told her with a weary shake of his head. “And since nobody’s really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.”

Noble was working as a consultant at a black think tank in downtown Washington, conducting research on shifts in black voting patterns in the last decade. He’d had a particularly rough day, he told her. “I’m not a desk man, somebody to sit in front of a computer and punch in statistics, graphs and all that. With Josh, I was his front man, the arm twister, the person who rallied the troops to reach into their pockets and pull out their checkbooks. I’m restless and bored doing research. And they know it.”

Macon made Noble a rum and Coke and fixed herself a mug of herbal tea. They watched the late news. When Macon turned the television off, Noble told her, “You know my parole ends soon.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you almost sound sad.”

“In a way I am.”

“You’ll miss being on parole?”

“I’ll miss my parole officer.”

“You’re kidding!” Macon exclaimed.

“No, I’m serious,” Noble said, folding his hands behind his head, stretching his legs out before him. “He’s a righteous dude. Righteous. Remember when we used to say that?” Noble winked at Macon. “He never made me feel like shit because I blew it. He just faced me man to man. Something my dad never did.”

“Your father’s a minister, what do you expect?”

“Yeah, it’s been rough all these years mainly because he’s never been my father, he’s always been my minister,” Noble said bitterly.

“And your parole officer?”

“I guess what I mean is—” Noble began.

“He forgave you.”

“Yeah.”

“The way your father hasn’t.”

“The way I’m scared he never will.”

“You’re his son. He knows that.”

“Hell, I learned how to raise money, grease palms, how to soak the rich and the poor watching my daddy pastor a church.” The words were vintage Noble-easy, enticing, only half true.

“Are you saying there’s no difference between what you did for Fairbanks and what your father did in the name of God?”

“I wish I could, Macon. But even I’m not that bold,” he admitted.

“Of course you are,” Macon said.

“Can I be that bold tonight? Will you let me?” Noble asked softly, reaching across the length of the sofa, pulling her close to him. “I don’t feel like being a gentleman,” he whispered in her ear. “And, Macon, I don’t want you to be a lady.”

As soon as they walked into her bedroom, Macon turned off the lights, but Noble quickly turned on the lamp beside her bed. He unbuttoned her blouse, his fingers nimble and quick, as Macon stared at a corner of the room, afraid to look at his eyes when he saw her chest. He gently pushed the blouse over her shoulders and kissed her on her neck, whispering, “Relax, please, don’t fight me, not now.”

His plea was so deep, so real, that Macon gave in. She rested her arms on his shoulders as he unfastened her bra in the back. The prosthesis came off easily, and Noble laid it on the bed beside them. He kissed her there, kissed her there first, on the place where she had thought for so long that she was empty. Dead. Noble made tiny circles of kisses around the place where her breast had been and then gazed up at Macon and kissed her eyes, stalling the onslaught of tears. They lay in her bed for a long time Noble simply running his hands over her body,
caressing her. When Macon reached for him, Noble said, “No, wait, let me make love to you.”

Beneath his touch she was renewed, her body a continent he joyously discovered. Later, lying in his arms, Macon asked quietly, “Does it matter to you?”

“Not one bit,” he said, letting his hand again rest there and gently fondle her. “One day it won’t matter to you either,” he assured her.

“Noble, I want to live,” she sighed. “I want to live a long time.”

“So do I, Macon, so do I.”

T
HE LOW RESTLESS
rumble of Edwin Braithwaite’s snores woke Pearl from a fitful, unsatisfying sleep. Her leading man lay on his side, his body bunched like a fist. She was always surprised to wake up beside her lovers. Not once had she succeeded in erasing the memory of their touch, or the surprise of the morning after. But she kept trying.

Fatigued from a nearly sleepless night, she rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. The play was in its last week in Washington; the run that had been extended earlier by two weeks. On tour for six months, Pearl wanted nothing more than to go back to New York. To go home. After Saturday night she would be free.

Pearl played the role of Wilhemena Grace. In the course of the play, her character aged from twenty to fifty-five. She was in virtually every scene, and she delivered a ten-minute monologue at the play’s conclusion. Some nights after the play she could not sleep, her willful alter ego, much as she did in the
play, refusing to release her grip on anyone who owed her allegiance, loyalty or love. But Wilhemena Grace had not haunted her sleep last night. Pearl had only dreamed about her father, as she had every night since his stroke.

“J
ESSIE, JESSIE
, is that you?” Olive Foster had shouted into the phone, as though she were talking to her daughter across an ocean or a universe. Pearl had been in a hotel room in Philadelphia, three hours before an evening performance, when the call came.

“Yes, it’s me, Mama.” She knew her mother’s voice. How could she forget it? She had spent most of her life wondering why this voice had not roused itself in her defense. She knew her mother’s voice.

“Your daddy’s took sick. Real sick,” Olive blurted out quickly. “Had a stroke two days ago. He’s in a coma. And it don’t look good.”

Pearl felt no relief, no sadness. She had no idea what to say. Mae Ann had kept Pearl informed of the hypertension, arthritis, then an attack of paralysis that virtually crippled Chester Foster in the last several years.

“You still there, Jessie?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m here.”

“Mae Ann was gonna call you, but I begged her to let me do it. I told her it was my place to tell you. You may not want me to be, but I am still your mama.”

“What do the doctors say?” Jessie asked, as she nervously turned on the television and saw the taut, lean bodies of several basketball players fill the screen.

“Say we just have to wait and see if he comes out of the coma. He’s been real sick a long time.”

“Mae Ann told me.”

“Was you mad at me too, Jessie? I know he hurt you. But you been mad at me all this time too? That why you never called or wrote, why you treat me like I’m less than a stranger?”

Pearl didn’t say a word. She could barely breathe.

“Wasn’t nothing I could do, Jessie.”

“Mama, there’s always something you can do. Something,” she said, finding her voice.

“You gonna come home to see him?”

“Mama, I’m in the middle of a tour. I have a show to do every night. I can’t just leave in the middle of a tour.”

“Not less he dies. They’ll let you come home then, won’t they? You saying you can’t come home till your father’s dead. The man who gave you life.”

“The man who raped me.”

Her mother’s startled sharp intake of breath whistled in Pearl’s ear.

“He’s dying, Jessie, he ain’t got long. You got to forgive.”

“Why do I have to forgive, Mama? Tell me why? He raped me.”

It had taken years of sporadic, wrenching therapy for her to say the word. Pearl had hungered for the catharsis she had mastered on the stage to infiltrate her life. She went through four therapists to find one she thought she might be able to trust one day. The therapy sessions were worse, she concluded, than anything her father had done to her. Initially she approached the sessions as a drama in which she skillfully masked the truth, her powers of deception hard won and polished from years of practice. Only when the therapist threatened to end the sessions, to in effect “fire” her as a client, did Pearl begin to peel off the layers.

Knowledge carved her up. Healing hurt as much as being sick. If before she had wanted to die because of her childhood, now she longed for death because she understood too well the woman she had become. A new, fiery language took shape in her mind, took hold of her life and refused to let go.

Anger was intoxicating, it left her exhilarated, but in the end it offered no peace. But anger had introduced her to the proper names, the correct designations. Anger settled quite effectively some scores and she said again, “Mama, he raped me.”

“Hush, girl, don’t be saying that.”

“What do you want me to call it, Mama? Give me a word to use instead.”

“I shoulda knowd,” Olive said wearily, “shoulda knowd you couldn’t forgive. He’s had his punishment. God made him pay.”

Her mother was preaching again. Olive Foster was an assistant pastor at a storefront Evangelical church whose zealous young pastor had spotted Olive on a downtown street corner one afternoon, a Bible open to Timothy, her shrill, yearning voice halting passersby with its promise of redemption and eternal love. Reverend Cane Montgomery had marveled at the small crowd gathered around the stout, elderly woman whose vigorous pronouncements of the Word were rooted, he could tell, in a shame so deep it threatened to be everlasting.

But to Pearl, her mother’s faith was a smoke screen, denying Olive Foster full entry into the region of her own specific pain.

“Did you ever wonder why I had to pay too, Mama?” Pearl asked, her voice breaking. “Why do you want to steal from me what I have a right to feel? I paid too. Mama, I’ve got to go now. Call me and tell me when I can come home. Call me and tell me when it’ll finally be safe.”

——

C
HESTER FOSTER
died at ten minutes after four, just as Pearl was walking on stage for a final curtain call during the Saturday matinee performance. The only witness to his death was his wife, who sat beside his bed as he silently slipped away. When he seemed no longer to be breathing, Olive Foster lifted her husband’s wrist and felt for a pulse. She placed her ear against his chest and heard no heartbeat, then she gently closed his eyelids. She sat back down in the chair beside his bed and looked, for what she hoped would be the last time, at the tubes taped along Chester Foster’s arms, the tubes running from his nose. His skin was withered, gray. The thick head of hair he had cherished as a younger man had begun falling out years before. Paralysis had deformed the muscles in his arms and hands so that his upper body resembled a twisted tree, split and shuddering with age. As Olive folded her hands in prayer, the only sound in the room was the hum of the television perched overhead. When she opened her eyes again, she gazed at her husband, thinking of the people she would now have to call, the plans she would have to make for the funeral. The first person she would call when she got home was Jessie.